Government splashes out £750,000 on 2012 tickets
SECRETARY of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport Jeremy Hunt has defended the Government’s decision to spend nearly £750,000 on tickets for next summer’s London Games.
Hunt’s department applied for and have been allocated 8,846 tickets to the Games, including 213 tickets to the Opening Ceremony at a total price of £194,525.
The allocation, which also incorporates £33,085 spent on 256 athletics tickets and £26,600 on 410 beach volleyball tickets, primarily funded by the taxpayer, is sure to anger the general public, especially after 700,000 of the 1.9m people who applied ended up with nothing.
But Hunt said yesterday: “The first point to make is that this is less than 0.1 per cent of all tickets and none of them are going to be given away to civil servants or politicians.
“A small number of those tickets will be made available to people who have been working hard on the project for the last five years or so but they have to buy those tickets at face value.”