London Olympics: Cap Council Tax Bills for 2012 Games, Say Tories

Council tax bills should be capped to prevent Londoners having to pay for cost overruns on the 2012 Olympic Games, the Conservatives demanded yesterday. Hugh Robertson, shadow sports and Olympics minister, says his party will also urge the chancellor to return the £320m in tax that the Treasury will take from the £1.5bn cash raised by the National Lottery for the Olympics. His comments foreshadowed tough battles ahead over the Olympics, even though the legislation to set up the framework for the 2012 games passed its first major Commons hurdle relatively unscathed. The London Olympics Bill sets up the Olympic Delivery Authority, which will control work on venues for the games, and contains stringent provisions to control ticket touts, non-official advertising and ambush marketing.

As the bill passed its committee stage, Conservative and Liberal Democrat spokesmen said they were determined to maintain the cross-party consensus to "kick-start" the process towards 2012. Robertson said: "We do not want the execution of running the games to be contentious. We want to produce a better bill, not stage manage political argument."

Richard Caborn, the sports minister, said: "The committee finished a day earlier than planned, which showed the cross-party support for the bill. The first two years are absolutely critical - getting the companies in place and the contracts launched - if we are to avoid a crisis at the end of the process."

Robertson said that while it was reasonable London council taxpayers should pay more, it should not be an "open-ended commitment" if there were overruns. From next April council taxpayers in the capital will be paying an extra 38p a week for Band D homes, raising £625m towards the £2.375bn cost of the games. "If there is an overrun it is down to the mayor to finance. We are trying to cap payments for the London council taxpayer." Caborn said: "We will sit down and resolve any cost overruns in the spirit of partnership with the mayor, but hopefully there will not be any. We are talking about something seven years away, so we do not want to cut any options off."