 Mae'r gweithio gyda'u cyfrifiadu cyfrifiadu cyfrifiadu cyfrifiadu, sy'n meddwl cyfwyr â'r arfer y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, a wedi cael eu cyfrifiadu cyfrifiadu cyfrifiadu a'r gweithio cyfrifiadu cyfrifiadu i gyfrifiadu cyfrifiadu Aelon? Llyfrgell, ddiddordeb amser. Mae'n gennym eu cyfrifiadu cyfrifiadu i'r ll yn cyfrifiadu i'r Llyfrgell i'r Llyfrgell, ac i'n meddwl am y cyfrifiadu. I can tell you, for me it's worth crossing the world to be able to spend some days with the peoples who are gathered here throwing corpse in all kind of diari arrangements and so forth in London and anywhere else. this is a rich discussion and a great opportunity. Now I'm not sure if I'm sort of the token politician, but you can see me or my genre either as a cause of many of the problems or perhaps more optimistically and what I would like to argue as perhaps a part of the solution. But first of all, let me say just a little bit about myself. I'm going to talk to you about London. I've lived in London for 40 years. I represent part of it in Parliament. I represent part of it on the south of the Thames, which includes one of the poorest parts of London with alongside one of the most affluent. And since the 2012 Games was a gleam or bidding for the 2012 Olympic Games was a gleam in anyone's eye, I have been involved with it. So I've seen London's many faces over those many years, the good, the bad and the ugly. And I've seen it move from that sluggish dirty sprawl of the 1970s to the confident, diverse, global city of today. So I want to talk a bit from my own experience of how this change took place, what more needs to be done, and how catalysts such as the Olympics are producing change on a scale that could not have been achieved without them. I'd like to talk a little bit about the importance of pluralism in achieving this change and also about the role of political leadership. Now, 25 years ago, London was a city in crisis. The infrastructure was crumbling and the damage done by the Second World War 40 years before was still apparent. And one of the shocks for a visitor at that time was still the number of bomb sites that were un-cleared. The economic shocks of the 70s and increasing foreign competition had devastated London's manufacturing base. East London's economic lifeblood, the docks, were closing. Population fell and unemployment rose. Urban decay was leading to widespread social unrest. But now, move the clock on to 2007 and London is now one of the fastest growing major European cities with an annual GDP of $406 billion. Its population is expected to grow to 8.1 million by 2016 with further growth beyond. London's economic footprint covers much of the south-east of England. So what was it that happened in those intervening years to create such a change? Not just in London, but also in other UK cities like Glasgow and Birmingham which have had a Manchester, which have had a similar renaissance. The formula that led to success, I believe, was not a simple cause and effect but a complex set of circumstances all acting on each other. But we can separate out and understand some of the trace elements that have driven this change and they include in a nutshell a healthy global economy, business optimism, immigration, active state intervention and political leadership. A commitment to a rich public realm increasingly important in the way London is developed, understood and enjoyed. And finally, money. It took money and lots of it and there is no solution if it doesn't include modernising infrastructure. The magic is in the interaction between these elements but let me say briefly something about the economy. The oil crisis of the 70s was the start of a long decline and throughout the 80s there was a lack of public investment and infrastructure and a lack of interest in private development and the public realm was progressively degraded. And by the early 90s negative equity caused by a drop in property values had contributed to a lack of confidence. London's economy wasn't quite anything. It wasn't any more about shipping and manufacturing. It wasn't about finance or creative industries either. When competitiveness returned to the UK, the fruits of new prosperity weren't planned for or indeed fairly distributed. Private affluence and public squalor remained even as employment began to rise. And throughout this time Londoners became younger and became more ethnically diverse. One third of London's population is now from an ethnic minority with 300 different languages spoken. Over one third are overseas born and the share is rising towards 40%. Now every wave of immigration most recently from the new Eastern European members if the EU brings with it a supply of new skills, new demand and new cultural influences. It is simply impossible now to imagine London's success without its diversity. This factor is due not to specific government policy but as a result of wider global trends. But London has been shaped in recent years by a deliberate move away from the laissez-faire of the 80s and the early 90s. Britain as a whole has enjoyed a stable economy in the last 10 years and this has given confidence to private investors domestic and foreign to invest in the continued development of London. Our regulatory and fiscal framework for business has supported London's comparative advantage in the global economy, not least in the creative industries and the traditional financial core. But vitally London now has strong political leadership with an ambitious vision for the city. For 14 years until 2000, London uniquely among major cities of the world had no city-wide government. It was the Labour government after its election in 1997 that set about putting in place the government for London and with that a directly elected executive mayor of London. The first mayor, Ken Livingstone, has successfully provided strategic leadership in the city through a range of confident and very purposeful policies. For instance, the introduction of congestion charging and the renewal of London's transport system. Now what I'd like to go on to argue is that city renewal without strong political leadership is very difficult if not impossible to achieve. And you know, condemn us in every respect that you can but watch your political leaders when they share common belief can bring is doggedness. And sometimes doggedness and an understanding of city aspiration which is ahead of its time. And let me give you a very specific example of this. I don't know how many of you know what Birmingham in the midlands of England, which prides itself as rather grudgingly if that's not too much of a contradiction as the UK second city, others would now contest that. But in the late 80s, Birmingham had a very strong, old-fashioned political leader who had been in place for a very long time. And he had a vision for what was the degraded centre at the shambles that was the centre of Birmingham which would be the creation of a new square, a world-class conference centre and a world-class symphony hall. Now you can perhaps imagine in a city that was reeling from the first recession and bracing itself for the second that the idea of building a symphony hall with the finest acoustic in Europe was seen as somewhat unnecessary. But 25 years later, the symphony hall is the envy of the world and every other major British city wants a symphony hall to emulate Birmingham and indeed other cities in Europe the same. It would not have happened had it not been for the dogged vision of a political leader who believed in a different kind of future for his city and set about it with visionary self-confidence. So this in London has given for the first time in a generation a sense of purpose to our civic renewal. And after the Victorian surge of good works to provide quality of life to improve public health through public spaces. The issue stagnated in the 90s. And since then with the injection of capital from our national lottery those spaces and amenities throughout our city have been revitalized and bolstered with an explosion of new cultural facilities in particular. London has the Tate, the most visited modern gallery in the world four and a half million visitors a year. It has great theatres, galleries and museums, more green space than any other city in the world and people want to visit it. They want to live there and that livability can only happen deliberately. It never evolves in an urban context which leads me to money. Sustained public investment to foster London's regeneration and to ensure the necessary infrastructures in place particularly transport. The growth of Canary Wharf, the new commercial centre has relied on it and last month the government gave the go ahead for the new cross rail project a £32 billion public transport project. And later this month Paris and London will be linked a little more than two hours away by the newly upgraded rail line. Crossrail will support 600,000 new jobs by 2016 in London's businesses. So far London has reinvented itself successfully but do not be blind or unseeing of the problems that remain. Those exacerbated by new wealth are profound and in the 12 months to June 2007 there was a decrease of 6% in firearm offences and yet two months ago we as a government had to launch tackling gangs action a programme to take very specific action in specific neighbourhoods in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool where gun crime and gangs are causing desperate harm to the safety of those communities and one of those communities in London is in my own constituency and at this time last Friday I was attending the funeral of a young 18 year old man, the father of a one year old son who had been shot for his mobile phone two months before. The funeral was attended by 1,000 young people as an act of more than anything else solidarity and optimistic assertion that their community can be better. Crime and that level of crime is bred in part by poverty and inequality, a huge problem turbo charged by our extremely expensive housing stock and our too small rented sector. Don't forget against the background of growing affluence that half of London's children grow up in poverty and in 2003 the wealthiest 1% owned approximately a fifth, 20% of the UK's marketable wealth. In contrast half the population shared only 7% of total wealth. But let me now turn in the time remaining to the east end of London and the Olympics. Tower Hamlets and Hackney are among the five most deprived local authority areas in England. And that is exactly why we chose to locate our bid for the Olympic Games in Stratford, an area that is poor, polluted and cut off from the rest of the city. And let me show you first of all a map which demonstrates the scale of deprivation. The red circle that you see with the colour index demonstrates the intensity of deprivation in the five Olympic boroughs. Let me just show you very quickly some of the existing dereliction. Let me go to the third site which shows you the site as it is now before any of the construction has begun. And let me show you now what we hope this Olympic site, the largest new urban park in Europe for 150 years will be like at the time of the Olympic Games. So we made a conscious decision that if we were going to bid for the Games it would also be a bid that would drive regeneration and we made a conscious decision to locate the Olympic Games in the hardest possible site because this is not a model for regeneration but it's more than that. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for London and we know that although the scale of public investment and if you like a strategic planning of the Olympic site is a statutory responsibility that the state alone cannot deliver urban regeneration. Sustainable regeneration, yes it requires good master planning and forging of strong partnerships with public bodies, different government departments, local and regional authorities and very particularly with communities. But it also requires an imperative of high quality design the involvement of local communities creating places in which people want to live. Because this investment is not just about 2012 it has to be about the long term the next 50, the next 100 years and the kind of community that will be able to live there. After the 2012 Games the park will not be an island it will be an integral new town in East London. The communities around the site the derelict site as it is at the moment have been more or less unconnected in the past. So the park will bring that together it will replace poorly planned industrial usage and its design will recognise the different places that surround it and help to connect them physically. 30 new bridges in this site intersected by waterways. So let's now just turn to some of the legacy benefits of the Olympic Park. New housing, sustainable housing built to the highest environmental standards. 12,000 new jobs in a part of London where the unemployment the unemployment rate is significantly higher and an area where and this is why it's important to look not just at the hard legacy the infrastructure but the soft legacy which is leaving a population after 2012 which is more skilled more employable than is the case at the moment. The key challenge for us apart from the obvious ones of managing the largest infrastructure project in Europe is the engagement of local communities. And Saskia I think referred to the different kind of political discourse. This needs to be real this cannot be imposed on those communities if those communities are to feel a lasting sense of ownership for it. Now we began this journey in conclusion we began this journey to the scale of ambition to bid to host the Olympic Games when Manchester hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2002. They were a great success both in regenerating one of the poorest parts of Manchester but also giving that city a sense of self confidence that it had never had quite before on the same degree and scale. So here we are in India Delhi will host the 2010 Commonwealth Games and I hope that some of the legacy that is so benefited Manchester will be part of the legacy that Delhi itself and indeed the whole of India will celebrate. It is a ground for optimism but it is a once in a lifetime opportunity. It requires courage and boldness and it requires from all those involved in creating a success a willingness to live outside your comfort zone for very many years. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you Tessa for that notably feet on the ground view of a great project in the future.