The International Olympic Committee may well welcome Japan’s decision to scrap and completely revise plans for its controversial National Stadium since the move will save money, the head of the Tokyo games organising group said yesterday.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said last week that he had decided to take the stadium plans back to square one in the face of growing public outrage over ballooning costs, as his support rates took a hit over unpopular defence bills.

The sudden decision over the stadium, designed by UK-based architect Zaha Hadid and set to be the centrepiece for the 2020 Summer Olympics, took many by surprise and became the latest in a series of broken promises connected to the event.

But Yoshiro Mori, president of the Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, said substantial savings on the stadium – projected to cost some $2 billion, nearly twice original estimates – fit right in to the IOC’s new cost-cutting policy.

Mori acknowledged that the futuristic stadium design had probably helped Tokyo beat off Istanbul and Madrid to be awarded the Games in 2013 but that the IOC was likely to approve the revised plans at a meeting in Kuala Lumpur later this month.

“If the decision was made to save money, it should go right in line with the IOC’s Agenda 2020,” Mori said.

Many nations have downsized stadium projects but it is unusual to change plans at this stage and risks damaging the can-do reputation that was one of the reasons Tokyo won the Games.