The story of the Olympic construction is a success story for British business. A project twice the size of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 was built in half the time and half a billion pounds under budget.

It was also a success story in terms of the benefit that it brought to the nation. Seventy-five pence in every pound was spent on regeneration. Efforts were made to invest in individuals – with 3,500 training opportunities offered on site, 457 apprenticeships on offer and 11 per cent of the jobs going to the formerly unemployed.

A strong business legacy and potential area of export growth has been created – with new capacity created for Britain to compete in construction and project management.

There are clear lessons that can be drawn for government when taking on projects of this nature. That the government needs to support the project wholeheartedly and seek to fashion a cross-party consensus. That the right level of funding needs to be secured from the Treasury, but that it then very quickly needs to get out of the way. That the scope and nature of the project, its timescale and the level of available funding needs to be clearly defined by government – and then they need to hire the best people in the world to achieve it.

But the approach taken to the Olympics has also created a new paradigm for how partnerships between the public and private sector should work.

It has taught us that when we’re spending money on public sector infrastructure – every penny has to work harder. This has meant that the £9.3bn spent on the Games will not just regenerate east London, but it has brought new ways of working that will allow the construction industry to be more successful in the future.

Rather than being a drag on the cost of the project, this approach can make the delivery operation more efficient and reduce costs.

The first lesson is that a public-private partnership should seek to create a higher purpose than the bottom line. During the Olympic construction project, this allowed the management to create an ethos that went beyond the simple objectives of the construction project. The focus on regeneration and local benefit not only built better relationships with local residents, but it also created a supportive culture within the workforce that ‘failure was not an option’ and that everything had to be done to make the project a success.

The second lesson is that the employer and trade unions need to be engaged in cooperation rather than confrontation. Over the course of the Olympic project, both sides agreed to work together in their common interests rather than lose together through entering into conflict. And what did this mean?

An organisational culture where problems were identified rather than hidden. Ways of working that engaged all staff in decision making rather horizontal rather than a simple top-down approach. A serious approach to health and safety – meaning that there was not a single fatality or serious accident on the entire project.

A failure to build this type of constructive relationship is a sure sign that future projects will be condemned to failure.

But perhaps the biggest lesson that can be drawn is that it makes business sense to invest in your workforce. Investing in apprenticeships, training opportunities and other investments in skills not only gave thousands of employees the prospect of a better future, but also increased the efficiency of the delivery operation.

When we started the programme, we originally thought that there would need to be 18-20,000 employees on site at the peak of the programme. But due to the real investment in the skills and capability of the people on site, the construction workforce peaked at 12,500, saving hundreds of millions of pounds in the process.

So my hope is that we can learn from the experience of the Games and take a new approach to public-private working in the future. My colleagues Ed Miliband and Chuka Umunna have rightly made the case for making an apprenticeships offer a precondition for receiving public sector contracts over a certain size.

My hope is that we can go further – and use the experience of the Games to provide a blueprint for making public money work harder in the public interest.

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Tessa Jowell MP is shadow minister for London and the Olympics. She tweets @jowellt

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Photo: Zoe Rimmer