Diane says utilise Hackney workers on Olympic Park

Diane Abbott MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington has called for contractors working on the Olympic site to utilise local people as work opportunities increase this year.

Figures released by the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) today show that just 2 per cent or 125 people out of 6,277 people working on the Olympic park construction site live in Hackney. Currently 20 per cent of workers are from one of the five Olympic boroughs, and 53 per cent live in London.

The number of people working on the construction site is set to increase to 11,000 this year.

Unemployed Geoff Joab, 57, who lives one mile from the Olympic site in Stoke Newington, is one skilled worker who cannot get work, despite looking since October 2008. Geoff, who has been out of work for 3 months, contacted the recruitment company he signed up with, Onsite, to check on progress and was told that they had lost his details.

“Nobody can seem to get any access to jobs on the Olympic site despite it being the biggest construction site in Europe,” he said.

Diane says targets should be introduced outlining the number of jobs to be filled locally, a method which would prevent contractors moving workers from site to site.

She said:

“Hackney has a disproportionately low number of people working on the Olympic Park and we know that many of these people may not even be permanent residents of the borough. Contractors need to utilise local workers. If the government set targets to encourage contractors to employ locally, this would go a long way to alleviate the unemployment in my constituency. The reason that Ken Livingstone was so keen on the Olympics was because it was a way of regenerating the East End. If we fail to achieve that regeneration, the Olympics will have failed.”