The costs everyone talks about are those for building the facilities and re-developing the games site. This is said to have quadrupled from 2.4 billion to 9.3 billion.
However, the 2.4 billion figure is wrong, as is the 9.3 billion figure.
Always added to that original 2.4 billion was an extra billion pounds of spending on local regeneration. So the 2.4 should be counted as 3.4.
And that original budget of 3.4 billion has now risen to 7.5 billion, not 9.3.
The 9.3 includes stuff - like security, VAT and some extra bits - that were always accounted for separately from the 3.4 billion.
So in other words, the original 3.4 billion has in fact risen by 120%. Or, a good journalistic way of saying a cost has risen by 120% would be to say it has "more than doubled".
That might sound like costs are "out of control", but when you take into account that 2.7 billion of that 7.5 billion is a contingency for unforeseen costs, you realise that we can't say costs are out of control yet. We don't know whether they'll go out of control, we are simply making sure we can cope if they do.
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