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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, when inspectors from the International Olympic Committee visit London this week, they’ll be checking London is on track to deliver the Games in a few months’ time but has the focus on delivering a successful Olympics on time actually taken our eyes off what happens afterwards? Is the so-called legacy of more young people and others playing sport being lost? Well joining me now from Maidstone is the Minister for Sport and the Olympics, Hugh Robertson. A very good morning to you, Mr Robertson, I’ll just start by asking about these cash for access allegations swirling around the Prime Minister and other Cabinet Ministers, it seems that wealthy people can pay large amounts of money and get time with senior government ministers.

HUGH ROBERTSON: Well I haven’t actually seen the papers, I must be honest, because I got home fairly late last night and I haven’t been down to pick them up yet but on the basis of the reports you’ve been running this morning, I think the quite interesting thing about this is that it rather proves that you can’t buy access because as has clearly been demonstrated, this is unacceptable and the person responsible has resigned.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Mm, but the allegations are there and the co-Treasurer is on tape saying if you pay £250,000 you get into the Premier League and you can have a chat with the Prime Minister.

HUGH ROBERTSON: Yes, and as soon as he was exposed doing that, he promptly resigned and that’s really the important thing. I don't think any politician in any party wants to see this sort of thing going on, it is absolutely not typical of the way that I understand the Conservative Party is financed and I am absolutely delighted that he has resigned as a result.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay. Do you think in your job you have ever met anyone, I mean a lot of big businesses swirling around the Olympics, have you ever met anyone who was there because of their access through a lobbyist?

HUGH ROBERTSON: No, I haven’t. We are regularly asked to meet people and indeed it is quite a big span here from people who are looking for very big contracts to people who see the Olympics as an opportunity to further their business building small swimming pools. You have got a huge range in the sports sector, it is a very big sector but we have a very strict code of conduct, I absolutely do not meet businesses pitching for contracts, that was done during the construction phase by the ODA, by the organising committee during the operational phase and by the legacy company for afterwards. So there is absolutely no question at any stage and there are very, very strict public procurement rules and in fact they have been such a success that they are now being rolled out across government as a model of how to do these large scale construction projects in the future.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay, let me ask you about the legacy then, moving on to the lasting legacy and I was there in 2005 in Singapore when I heard Lord Coe make that impassioned plea to the IOC and talking about the millions of people who would be absolutely moved to get involved in sport as a result. It seems – and that would be a real lasting legacy I’m sure you would agree – it just hasn’t happened in Britain.

HUGH ROBERTSON: No, I don’t think that’s entirely right. If you talk to somebody like David Brailsford, the Performance Director of British Cycling, he will tell you that since Beijing alone, an extra half a million people have started cycling. I live in a part of Kent where cycling has suddenly become very popular and if I had gone down to get the papers first thing this morning there would have been a huge, I mean a noticeable increase in the number of people doing that. We are told across sports that that is happening in a number of areas. The problem is that we as a government, as the last government has done, have measured sports participation by an incredibly testing target. You have to do three separate instances of it a week and I think that very, very tough measurement is masking a much greater improvement in the number of people who play sport once or twice a week but fail that three times a week target and one of the things we’re doing as part of the new strategy is having a more sensible once a week target.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay, so you might move the goalposts on that but what about the physical facts, the financial facts that Sport England has had some of its funding cut, the Schools Sports Partnership has gone and free swimming, that’s gone too.

HUGH ROBERTSON: Look, let me just run you through it. I’m afraid what you have said is just factually incorrect. Sport England has not had its funding cut, one of the first things that we did when we came into power in 2010 was increase the amount of money that sport gets through the National Lottery. That means that it has gone up from 13.7% under the last government to 20% under this one so that all the lottery beneficiaries get the same amount of money. That will release an extra half a billion pounds to sport so at the end of this cycle Sport England has more money than it had at the beginning. That has allowed us to do the facilities improvement programme and the new Youth Sport Strategy so it is absolutely wrong and factually incorrect to say that.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: All right, I’ll take that on board. What about free swimming?

HUGH ROBERTSON: Free swimming had actually already gone by the time I got behind my desk. The independent assessment of the free swimming programme showed that it was enabling people who were already swimming in the main to swim more, it wasn’t attracting new swimmers into the sport and there is a much more difficult piece round about participation in terms of how you alter social behaviour, how you attract families into sport and all these sorts of things. If you look at the four sports that we can really do this in, they tend to be those sorts of sports and actually there have been a number of other schemes that have moved in to replace it. Your opposite number the BBC are running a very good scheme called The Big Splash that has made a considerable impression, swimming is getting better at doing this through the whole sport plan so actually the free swimming went because it wasn’t delivering what it was set up to deliver and actually the encouraging thing is that since that time, through other schemes, better targeted schemes, more people have started swimming.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay, let’s look at some of the other issues in terms of legacy, the regeneration of that segment of east London. It’s a lot of money to put in there and in terms of employment we hear a lot of the skilled workers have been migrant workers and I know that there has been a policy of trying to hire from the local workforce if at all possible. Is the issue of small businesses there saying that the big shopping centres that have been set up there have been sucking their business away and they are not allowed to sell stuff with the Olympic logo on because of copyright issues.

HUGH ROBERTSON: If you’ll forgive me, Dermot, that is about the most negative possible spin you could put on it.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: But it’s true.

HUGH ROBERTSON: We set ourselves … just wait a moment. Back in 2005 as you and I both know because we were both in Singapore, we had in front of us the largest construction project that this country has ever undertaken, the largest construction project anywhere in Europe, the equivalent of building two Terminal Fives in half the time. That has been achieved on time and under budget, it has leveraged in as only a start £1.5 billion worth of private sector funding in the Westfield shopping centre, that is 98% of those contracts have gone to British firms. There is an extremely good line that says that this is a project that has singlehandedly rescued the reputation of the British construction industry. You will remember that we bid for the World Athletics Championships in the early 2000s and then had to hand them back because we couldn’t build the stadium at Picket’s Lock. Run that forward to a year ago when I was part of the team that went out to bid for the World Athletics Championships this time round, there is so much trust in us internationally now that we were given the right to host the World Athletic Championships in 2017 despite a bid backed by £38 million from Doha. This has been completely transformational for British sport and for British business.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Are you worried though, I mean yes, World Athletics Championships, that the stadium itself could become a white elephant with its long term future still uncertain?

HUGH ROBERTSON: You are determined to find all the most negative things about this that you can possibly find. We have just closed the latest round of bidding, there are four expressions of interest, six out of the eight main facilities on the park are already let in legacy mode, that has never been done and we are on track to deliver the remaining two, the stadium and the broadcast media centre by the time the Games have started. That has never, ever been done in the history of the Olympic Games and it is a real testimony to the quality of the work, the quality of the construction work and the quality of the legacy work being done by the Olympic Park Legacy Company on the site. This has been a fantastic success story for this country, we’re out in the ten major markets around the world launching the great campaign and I think what London 2012 has given us is a renewed confidence in terms of our construction, our ability to run major events and sport in this country and just look at the fantastic list of sports events that are now coming to this country on the back of the Olympics. This has been a real British success story.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Minister, thank you very much indeed. The Minister for Sport there being relentlessly upbeat on this lovely Sunday morning, Hugh Robertson there joining us from Maidstone.

HUGH ROBERTSON: It’s one of the things but there are other things that could have been done too. Instead of directly restricting how much an individual borrower could borrow, couldn’t borrow at any price, what we’re saying is that instead we might try and raise the price of credit to some households, to some businesses. That’s a better way than cutting them off at the knees and saying they can’t borrow at any price.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: But would you watch from the sidelines if, and it’s nearly there, if the 100% mortgage comes back, the 125% mortgage comes back?

HUGH ROBERTSON: What we’ve said is that let’s have a debate about whether it is the general public, parliament, would want to vest these tremendously intrusive powers on the Bank of England. If the answer to that is yes then I think we would be happy to take on that responsibility and to impose what you are saying. As it is, I think we already have some instruments at our disposal that can protect the system from those risks going wrong. It was those risks going wrong that caused the problems that, as I say, we’re still now experiencing.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: And can I just ask you from the Bank of England’s point of view, you mentioned the European Central Bank and the help they have been offering directly to banks in getting money to them at very cheap rates. Is that something that the Bank of England would consider in certain circumstances?

HUGH ROBERTSON: Well listen, we look at the problems in Europe and what the European Central Bank has done, it has provided liquidity to buy time but no one is in any doubt that the underlying problems in Europe are not ones of money, they’re not ones of liquidity, they are ones of competitiveness, they are ones of indebtedness and those are structural problems that require structural solutions that will take time and what the ECB are doing is buying time for those structural changes to happen. It’s not a solution, it’s a sticking plaster.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: That can is being kicked down the road a bit. Andy Haldane, thank you very much indeed.