Despite admitting that there is no housing legacy from the Athletes’ Village, as the housing would have been built anyway, the ODA is still claiming the Athletes’ Village is an Olympic Legacy, a kind of Time Lapse Legacy, because they assert that the involvement of the Olympics means the project will be delivered earlier than it would otherwise have been, see article ‘2012 Legacy Housing Double Counting’. So I decided to ask another FoI question to establish when the ODA thought the housing would have been delivered if the ODA had not taken over the site and to ask them to further explain their reasoning.

Latest Velopark plan

The ODA has had to admit that housing for the Athletes' Village being built at Stratford City, now renamed Stratford 2011, would have been built anyway, making a nonsense of the claims of a Housing Legacy from the Village, see the attached FOI response. To justify its continued insistence that the Village does indeed have a Legacy value the ODA is resorting to the argument that the housing on the Stratford City site would not have been delivered until much later, if it had not been for the Olympics.

American landscape architects are promising east Londoners a park that will be "equivalent to Hyde Park" and "will give the area an equal weight to the west" (Olympics will leave east London an open space to rival Hyde Park, March 17). However, there are fundamental questions about the way the park and its surrounding developments are being planned that your article fails to address.

Extracts from the debate

Lord Mawson (Crossbench) introducing the debate

We worry about what we see taking place under what one very experienced developer calls the smoke and mirrors of the Olympic Legacy.

When you stay in one place for a very long time you watch successive government programmes. Their effect on people's lives is often quite different from the intention of the rhetoric that launched them.

NEW council tax rises may be needed to fund the 2012 Olympics and its aftermath, it has emerged. A leaked report and parliamentary answers suggest that not only will households in London be affected, but also taxpayers in the surrounding counties, including Essex and Hertfordshire.

A new report predicts that the value of the UK CCTV market will increase by 10 per cent by 2012, with the London Olympics leading the growth. And equipment sales are anticipated to reach over £450m in the same period.