Research paper into the experiences of small businesses forced to move to make way for the 2012 London Olympic Games.

‘Just a person in a wee flat’ Margaret Jaconelli, the last person left living on the site of the Athletes’ Village for the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games, has been told she will be evicted. She protests that she has been offered totally inadequate compensation for the compulsory purchase of her flat and will be unable to buy a replacement property.

The Fluid Survey was carried out in August and September 2004. It followed two meetings at the end of November 2003 and in February 2004 at which the LDA had met with the Clays Lane community. At the first meeting the LDA had said the estate would be demolished even if the Olympics did not come to London. It had produced a drawing of a non-Olympic scenario at the meeting in November. Enquiries by residents showed that in reality there was no such non-Olympic plan and later, at the CPO Inquiry in 2006, Jason Prior, the Olympics Masterplanner, revealed in his evidence that an investigation into a non-Olympic plan for the area was not even commissioned until the summer of 2004 and was then abandoned as unviable.

The Inspector for the Inquiry into the 2012 Olympics Compulsory Purchase Order only produced an advisory report. The final decision was left to the Minister for Communities, then Alastair Darling, who ignored the Inspector's recommendations regarding the Travellers. There was never the remotest chance that the Inspector would not recommend acceptance and even less that Mr Darling would not grant the order. The whole process was a sham.

The dismal record of mega event evictions, media manipulation, lying and overspends continues. Sochi is striving hard to compete with Delhi and Beijing as the most brutal event in recent years.

Stories of environmental disasters continue to surface with a new report that Sochi lacks sites to dispose of garbage and construction waste. At the moment waste is dumped on a site which frequently sees blazes and the waste is said to be polluting the Pitkha River, which runs into the Black Sea. Environmentalists are also protesting at development plans which threaten the landscape of parts of the North Caucasus which are protected as natural UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The Clays Lane Former Tenants Association (CLFTA) has recently discovered, to its astonishment, that the London Development Agency deducted money from the compensation paid to forty of the tenants relocated under the Olympic Compulsory Purchase Order. Eleven of those relocated received no compensation at all.

Three Games, three eviction stories. In September 2009 Planning Theory and Practice Magazine published, in its Interface section, three articles on displacement caused by three different mega-events, the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the 2012 Summer Olympics in London and the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The publication is attached.

The LDA has now provided the information I asked for, see below*. Ms Adams says 'If it is helpful, I address each aspect of your request below for the sake of clarity.' That is certainly useful and, 'for the sake of clarity', would indeed have been helpful first time round! Still, let's not be churlish and thank the LDA for providing the information requested.