Stadiums will be subsidised

Council tax payers are to underwrite the running costs of the stadiums planned for London's 2012 Olympics bid.

Mayor Ken Livingstone has promised to use his budget to subsidise the operation of the sporting venues to be built if London wins its bid, to prevent them becoming "white elephants".

He will pay to keep the venues - which will include a new athletics stadium, velodrome, swimming centre and gymnastics facility - in use after the Games are over.

The move is designed to guarantee they do not become a second generation of Millennium Domes.

It comes as work began today on the first possible Olympic venue to be newly built - twin 50-metre swimming pools and a diving pool which will form the aquatics centre in the Olympic park in Stratford.

The site will be cleared in the first phase of the project to build the centre, which will be divided between community use and a training centre for elite athletes.

The Mayor's underwriting plan was revealed as fresh details of London's bid were made public during fierce lobbying of International Olympic Committee members in Athens.

It is expected to cost up to £10million a year to keep the stadiums and other venues open, the Mayor's officials said.

Mr Livingstone said the funding was essential to make sure the venues could be used to bid for other sporting events in the future and continue to be used by local communities. "It would be an absolute scandal if we created these things and then saw them dismantled and not used," he said.

"With sports complexes of this kind, you always need a degree of subsidy. The funding we are talking about is a thousandth of my budget.

"Compared to what it will bring to London, in terms of a constant rolling programme of major international events coming to what has been one of the most deprived areas of the country, it is a contribution to

making sure the venues keep going and I believe it to be well worthwhile."

Mr Livingstone's officials are negotiating with Whitehall over how exactly the underwriting deal will work and whether it would mean the Mayor taking direct control of the stadiums and venues after the Games are over.

It ends speculation that the Olympic stadium could be sold to a Premiership football club in a deal similar to the one which saw a stadium built in Manchester for the Commonwealth Games in 2002, then handed over to Manchester City.

Bid bosses have now made a series of key changes to their plans after a series of criticisms from the International Olympic Committee earlier this year.

The new plans were revealed at the last public presentation to be made by Lord Coe and his team before the secret ballot of IOC members next July which will decide whether London beats favourite Paris and other candidates New York, Moscow and

Madrid to host the world's biggest sporting event.

The shooting tournament would now be held at the former Royal Artillery headquarters at Woolwich instead of at the current British shooting centre in Bisley, while the velodrome would now be located in Stratford and fencing would be moved from Alexandra Palace to the main park.

The IOC had criticised the bid for locating too many sports away from the planned Olympic park. It also raised serious concerns about the state of London's transport infrastructure.

But Mr Livingstone and Lord Coe said they were confident that the extension of the East London line and improvements to the Docklands Light Railway were enough to meet that criticism.

"We are going to spend £17billion over the next eight years investing in transport," the Mayor said.

The investment includes the completion of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link from Stratford to St Pancras, which will be used to shuttle 25,000 people from central London to the Games in seven minutes on a new service which Lord Coe revealed is to be called the Javelin.