Bishop's speech on Olympic Games 2012

The Bishop of Chelmsford

My Lords, on the evening of 6 July 2005 I was licensing one of our priests to a parish in East Ham. He came from Burma, and in front of me was a multicultural congregation. There was a palpable sense of celebration and joy at the thought of the Olympics coming into their community. A very large portion of the Olympic site lies in my diocese. I and my colleagues, the right reverend Prelates the Bishop of Southwark, who is here today, and the Bishop of London, in collaboration with our ecumenical partners, seek to put a structure in place in the churches and the faith communities to ensure that we, too, think about how the legacy works out and how we can play our part in this great event.

It is worth remembering, without taking anything away from all those who promoted the bid, that the children of east London played a significant part in the final stages of winning the bid for London. It is important that they and their generation are the people who benefit from the Games arriving in our capital city. I hope that your Lordships will forgive me for talking for a moment or two about the wider cultural, social and spiritual issues at stake, in terms of regeneration.

Will this event seriously take account of the context in which it is to be set? The London Borough of Newham is probably one of the most multicultural boroughs in Europe; it is certainly one of the youngest communities in Europe. As an east London borough, it contains quite a high proportion of children and young people who fall below the poverty line. Are those young people and children going to be engaged in the Games?

Last year we had the incidents of people being arrested in Stratford on terrorist charges, and all the issues of the image of young people from different cultural communities. Will this be an opportunity for us to build a more open and successful society, including the many faces of life that form our community today? As the planes bring the athletes into London, will we still have aeroplanes taking asylum seekers and refugees out of London? I had my attention drawn to a person who had been working in Newham for 10 years but who, last week, was sent home. These issues have to be joined up and connected.
Will the Games have a ring of steel around them, in which case the community in which they are set will not be engaged, or will there be real opportunities, by us all working together through volunteering and employment, to draw a whole generation into the excitement of this experience?

If you go into east London today, you cannot avoid the reality that religious faith is important for people. It is important that the legacy of the Games also takes account of those issues in their lives for the future. Will we have a serious conversation, not just with the churches but with the other faith communities, about the needs of those communities for the future? I was told, recognising the size of the south-east of England, that nearly two-thirds of young people who are active members of churches in England are inside the ring of the M25 and that a very high proportion of them go to predominantly black-led churches. How are their needs, as they see them, to be met in the structuring of the legacy? Are we thinking about those sorts of facilities?

I want to talk about housing. I understand that people are already buying up properties in east London and that the affordability of housing is becoming an issue. I am told that people in Asia and across the world are buying properties with a view to the Games. What are the proportions of the affordable housing that will be part of the legacy? I heard what the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, said about the London Docklands Development Corporation. I am sure that we all endorse the need for a clear structure, but one outcome that we do not want in east London is the gentrification of Tower Hamlets and Newham whereby the poor of those communities disappear into Barking, Dagenham and Thurrock. With the mobility of people, there are now 11 BNP councillors in Barking and Dagenham. We must watch that in the end we do not say how wonderful things are in the immediate communities when all we that have done is shift the problems elsewhere; we gentrify the riverbank and a few hundred yards back, moving the poor elsewhere. That will not do. We must think about the social issues and make sure that the benefits of the legacy go to the people who host the Games. These are complex social, spiritual and cultural issues, but they are terribly important because if we get the legacy right we shall have done something for the well-being of the whole of our country.

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