14 
The London Olympics were supposed to provide UK firms with work — the British taxpayer has to foot the ginormous bill for these dubiously profitable games somehow, after all.Now it turns out that something seemingly as simple as printing tickets for the events has been outsourced to the US, and it’s going to cost you £6 in postage for the privilege. What. The. Hell?
The multi-million pound contract has been awarded by the London Olympics Organising Committee (Locog) to a printing firm based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, USA; totally side-lining the myriad of British printing firms that could have done the job locally.
The 11 million tickets weighing in at 16 tonnes will be printed up and shipped the 4,500 miles to Blighty in bulk by airfreight. That seems a hell of a lot of work for something we could have done in the UK, and it’s so typically British to snub our own firms for outsiders.
“The contract to print tickets was awarded following a thorough, competitive and open tender run through Compete For (tendering website),” said an Olympics spokesperson talking to the Evening Standard on the matter. But it turns out that UK printers might not have even been given the chance to bid on the contract. I know there’s something to say for experience when dealing with these massive orders, but surely there must be companies big enough in the UK to deal with it properly. Maybe it came down to cost, but cost isn’t everything you know, and at least if we’re paying a British firm to do it we’re going to get some of that money back in tax.
Locog says that 95 per cent of the contracts for the games went to British companies. It just seems totally outrageous to ship something like this out to the US, or anywhere else other than Britain for that matter. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against America, but there’s no way any Olympics held in the US would farm something like this out to a non-US company, so why on Earth did we? [Evening Standard]
Image credit: Tickets from Shutterstock
A Quick Flick Round the Track In a Vintage Porsche? That'll Be £111,000 Please
Want Your Own British Botnet? That'll Be Just £53 Please
Kim Dotcom: Please, Bring Us to America
It would be easy to blame the Torys, who will allow the budget of the games to far exceed any estimates. So I will
In reality spending is made by people with no financial responsibility or accountability and thus they are spending with no regard.
I wonder if maybe the person who made this decision took a business trip to the usa to inspect the premises?
95% sounds good but how is that figure worked out. If its in numbers of contracts then it would disregard the fact that big ones like this are being given away outside the UK.
Would like to see a figure for the % of money being spent in the UK vs outside.
Probably because the person at Locog who authorised the deal may have been given a directorship on the board of the US company doing the printing.
Backhanders get you everywhere.
And I doubt its anywhere near 95%. They are mostly a subsidiary of foreign companies that set up a British based business purely for the Olympics, which will be closed down after the summer.