Swimming Pool in Deep Water

You just want to write good, even great things about our industry, but sometimes we get ourselves in a spot of bother and it becomes a PR battle.

Once again the Olympic Delivery Authority are in deep water following a report prepared by MP's criticising the increase in budget on the iconic swimming pool, the centre piece in the development.

The budget for the pool was at the outset, £75m. It has now risen to £242m with a further £61m spent on a land bridge forming part of the roof.

"[The aquatic centre] appears to be over-designed and an expensive way of providing the facilities for water sports needed during and after the games," it states. "The history of the aquatics centre shows a risible approach to cost control and that the games' organisers seem to be willing to spend money like water."

"The radical revision of cost estimates has been damaging to confidence in the management of the overall programme [and] has exposed the government and games organisers to the charge that the initial bid was kept artificially low to win public support," they state.

According to the committee's calculations, £3.7bn of the budget, more than 30%, is made up of contingency, and the MPs say that it would be a significant failure if the games ran over budget: "The mark of success in financial management of the games will be to have kept expenditure to a level comfortably below the £9.325bn ceiling."

Perhaps it should now be the turn of the ODA to undertake a review of MP's expenditure, and waste even more Public Money..