Running rings around London's poorest

They say that gold doesn't tarnish, but this week's scrutiny of school sports programmes in light of Team GB's medal count has certainly taken a shine off Tory talk of an Olympic legacy.

On Sunday, as the Games drew to a close, PM David Cameron pledged £500m in funding for training 2016's Rio Olympics team "to reward the success of the UK's outstanding elite sport system."

But MPs and the media meanwhile seized on another kind of elite sport - a cost-cutting rollback of PE programmes and facilities in Britain's state schools.

The Department for Education confirmed it had scrapped requirements to offer secondary students at least two hours' PE a week - nor will schools even need to report what they are offering.

Neither will they require a minimum size and number of playing fields, instead needing only the vagaries of "suitable outdoor space," no doubt a tempting offer for academies and free schools which can sell them off without the department's approval.

And meanwhile Labour's researchers found massive cuts of 37 per cent to delivery of its School Sport Partnerships, which give PE teachers paid leave to co-ordinate competitions and programmes.

Since a fresh-faced Mr Gove cut ring-fenced funding from £162m to just £51m, days on release across every region in Britain have more than halved, and more than one in four local authorities no longer have any Partnership programmes at all.

All this puts a damper on Tory peer and "legacy ambassador" Lord Coe's vow to "inspire a generation." But there's another kind of Olympic legacy with a much more immediate and alarming impact - in east London, at any rate.

The boroughs' community organisers long ago predicted a flurry of Olympic opportunism among landlords, but they warned it would mask a much more permanent rise in housing costs, straining impoverished families even further.

What Locog calls regeneration, locals call gentrification.

Developers Delancey have promised to convert part of the Athletes' Village into "affordable housing" in a nod to corporate social responsibility - 1,379 apartments' worth.

But affordable for whom? In statutes the term now covers anything up to 80 per cent of market rents, and the illustrious new E20 postcode is hardly going to keep the yuppies at bay.

In fact, in Newham - where the village is based - locals are already under attack from their own council.

Data collected by the Digital Property Group in January found the average flat in Newham now costs £1,589 a month - just £244 less than the area's average household income. Housing benefits are now capped at £400 a week.

No surprise then that researchers from housing charity Shelter last year reported the second highest rate of repossession claims in the whole country.

Meanwhile its waiting lists now equate to around 35 per cent of all households in the borough - a backlog that, given the current rate of new builds, would take 40 years to relieve.

Which is why a Stoke-on-Trent housing association in April blew the whistle on Newham's attempts to bump tenants off their waiting lists, exiling them to the town 170 miles away instead for what council officers described as "the buoyant young professionals market."

Brighter Futures CEO Gill Brown was adamant: Newham faced "a real issue of social cleansing" - and that was just the start, based on previous relocations of needy people.

"The result was huge, unplanned pressure on local services, the collapse of already vulnerable neighbourhoods and the rise of divisive right-wing extremism.

"We believe that if London boroughs are allowed to export their most vulnerable and challenging families to cities like Stoke-on-Trent, then exactly the same will happen again."

Nor is it just Newham. In Tower Hamlets - where Canary Wharf towers over some of the poorest streets in Britain - more than a fifth of households get by on less than £15,000 a year.

The council has built no less than 4,670 "affordable housing" units in the last four years, but reports that around 7,600 homes on its register are still overcrowded - a figure that comes as little surprise when even a one-bedroom flat comes in at a median market rent of more than £1,000 a month.

In Hackney the figures are no better. A waiting list of around 12,000 would-be tenants, in a neighbourhood where the median household income is £343 a week - and a typical one-bedroom flat is £270.

As for cheaper social housing, Hackney is the only one of the three boroughs to meet even half of its new build target for 2010.

So far London's shiny happy regeneration project has shown every sign of simply squeezing out the old untouchables - and among the likes of Coe and Cameron, those signs are being studiously ignored.