When I first heard about the garden bridge project, I was quite supportive. A large bridge over the Thames which would be a garden and woodland escape from the noise and bustle of the capital of the country appealed.
It would also be a major tourist attraction and probably, as most things innovative and British, I am sure large cities across the world would copy this new concept.
The project caused a great stir amongst the media as it was initially proposed by the actress Joanna Lumley. Thomas Heatherwick an architect worked with an engineering company called Arup on the proposal for Transport for London. It was set to be funded largely by private funding garnered from donations through charitable gift aid. Construction costs, as at April 2017 were estimated to be £170 million.
Sadly, as the way of a lot of innovative British ideas, the cost and funding took over the wonderful fantasy of trees flowers beds of lilies and sunflowers. The bridge therefore got cancelled as costs were estimated to rise to well over £200 million.
Much speculation was made about what the expenditure had been made to get the design, planning and basic plans for this bridge to the point where it was abandoned. As usual no clarity was ever given and the project ended its life in April 2017.
There then ensued a public row between Boris Johnson, the previous Mayor of London, and Sadiq Khan the current Mayor. Boris blamed Khan for pulling the plug on the project and “killing it”, Khan said Londoners should be “very angry” at wasted monies expended on the failed bridge. It was said then that approximately £37 million had been spent.
£26 million from the Department of Transport and £11 million from the Transport for London department was spent. £8.4 million was given to the company engineering company Arup.
Revised figures out recently put the spend at more than £53.5 million.
Taking the lower figure of £37 million pounds. This was spent on what exactly? People reading this will agree that this is an enormous amount of money. No bricks were laid, no steel structures made for the bridge, no plants or trees planted. There is no bridge, there is no entrance to the bridge, no drawings of it. There is nothing now whatsoever to tell anyone that this bridge was even a seed of an idea in the mind of an actress.
Where is the money? Where are the accounts and who got paid and how much and for what activity or service did they get £37 millions?
Someone in an office somewhere pressed the BACS transfer button from one account to another or signed off a cheque that would allow funds to be sent. Who sent the money or signed the cheques?
It seems as other things which have happened involving large amounts of public money that there is simply no accountability. No one loses a job or is at the very least demoted.
Remember “Kids Company”? Millions of pounds were given to the owner and founder, the very colourful Camila Batmanghelidjh of this charity. Oliver Letwin was the minister who authorized payments totalling £3 million for an emergency restructure into the Kids Club account from Government. This was literally days before it shut up shop and ceased to be.
Who has lost their job over that, who was responsible, where are the accounts for that failed company? Where is the money? Who got it, it was millions, has anyone chased the money, where did it go within days of landing into the account before the company ceased to be? It was alleged that most of that money went to pay salaries owed to staff, what £3 million? This cannot be and you just have to wonder what the hell happened to all that money.
The current HS2 project has uprooted many people already in both homes and businesses. It has caused heartache and serious problems to many people, not withstanding the many thousands of others who are seeing their homes and businesses and land compulsory purchased.
Estimates for the railway (which will get you from London to Birmingham a whole half hour quicker) were originally around £58 billion. This is now reported to be nearer £110 billion and rising. You can bet your bottom dollar it will be much more than £110 billion by the time the trains get going.
There is now though a growing unrest about the project and some MPs are calling for it to be scrapped. How much has been spent so far? Millions have gone already to PR companies, who, what, where and when. As per usual we will not get to know. There is one thing for sure, someone has got very wealthy out of this.
There is no accountability. No one loses their jobs, no one assumes or takes responsibility for vast sums of monies literally disappearing from the public purse.
As somebody who had been gainfully employed in the heavy engineering sector for the best part of 50 years …..Boy , Skin and Manager ,I have witnessed many means of pricing jobs ….Just one smallish employer , would cost materials and double it …. would cost probable hours worked on Sunday rates and triple it , put in a generous handful for ancilliaries then double the final result .. and very often would not get the job ,because he was too CHEAP.
I’ve recently visited the world renowned V & A building in Dundee
It’s very sad. Because i’ve rarely met a sad scot or architect. It’s unworthy of them. But hellish expensive.
But it’s an example of which your representatives are probably proud..
Well. It’s new.
Lots of gimmicks wasting space on a grand scale. Please not employed on bridges or escalators
This is not architecture, It’s just daft.! A bit like the predatory hedgehog but not funny .Lots of stuck on bits.
Oh ye`ll tak the high road and I`ll tak the low road and I`ll be in Dundee afore ye.
Well I was there in January so maybe I was afore ye.
Had already come to the conclusions you had, it was certainly imposing in fact so much so as to be a blot on the estuaryscape, even worse than the concrete lump that was the swimming baths it replaced and they did at least have some use…
V & A they say!
VAST and APPALLING
VULGAR and ANACHRONISTIC
need I go on it`s awful? Just as a matter of interest what did it cost and who paid for it? at least basic entry was free although you had to pay for a separate exhibition of famous Liners
However a visit to the site is not to be wasted next door to the V & A is the RRS Discovery. -well worth a visit!,
Oh and if you`ve time go and have a look at the Falkirk Wheel.
From the EU point of view the balance of payment problems of most eu countries would instantly be corrected with exports to HS2.
You could build a thousand garden bridges for the same money and chuck in Boris Island.
‘Travel costs for the under-fire HS2 project have topped £2.5million for the whole of last year, Ministers have revealed. Overnight accommodation for employees staying away from home cost £600,000 in 2018 around £10,000 per week. Records show eye-watering spending also includes £5.6 million on agency staff – the equivalent of a £120,000 annual salary. The figures came to light this week after Ministers were said to be “actively considering” scrapping the HS2 scheme. The PM has faced to calls to kill off the project that will cut travel times and boost capacity between the capital and Birmingham.’ – The Sun on Sunday
Once again, questions need to be asked. A lot of money is being spent here, on exactly what? Why are overnight accomodation costs being met, weren’t the HS2 jobs supposed to be going to ‘local’ people? Why so much on agency staff, what happened to all the full-time jobs that were supposed to be created? How much has been spent and has a single metre of track been laid anywhere yet? If the project does get scrapped, how much money will we (the taxpayers) be able to claw back, or will even more money have to be spent to ‘compensate’ contractors and developers for ‘loss of business’?
HS2 won’t get scrapped, not by this government anyway, because far too many people are getting drunk from the seemingly never-ending supply of taxpayers money.
I thought as an EU specified project it couldn`t be cancelled, without their permission anyway!
Perhaps if we Brexit without a deal maybe it would be possible to kill it off them????
£ 2.5 million. that is One forty thousand th, of what is still going to be spent.’
These are unimaginable figures For the same cost we could build A bridge from Scotland to NI, plus Boris Island and support infrastructure and have enough change to give the EU its divorce fee.if she really wants to.
||And all for EU vanity.
I wonder who those agency staff on 120k are? Certainly in my own experience not the Engineers. So if the average is 120k what does that say about the few (hangers-on)?
Overseas Aid? I did suggest that any funds for this enormous amount of yearly expenditure be directed through our overseas Embassies and Consulates, who should be accountable to the British taxpayer. Yearly accounts to be provided to show exactly where the money has gone and what projects have received the funding. Apart from anything else it would be interesting to see the improvements made to peoples lives, and would prevent the money getting into the hands of dictators and corrupt individuals, which we are constantly hearing about.
Better still just stop it and dismantle the government department responsible for dishing it out, saving a few salaries too. Disaster assistance is a different matter and can be handled as required but with proper governance.
Socialists only want to do anything for the glory that is socialism.or themselves. Money does not count for these aims
The system is supposed to be :- there’s your money. Now make it. No you can’t have any more. Prison if it isn’t done. Start again diferent people.
For heavens sake these are Civil Servants.and blameless.Except that is exactly what they are not.
I thought the garden bridge was a fantastic idea. Why can’t The costs be fixed at the start.
Cost estimates require a design; design is complex and requires site / ground investigations. All that initial work costs a significant amount. Construction contracts normally include a price fluctuation clause to compensate for unforseeable changes in the cost of materials etc. Initial estimates probably produced by an optimist without the requisite experience or, as Roger suggests, deliberately understated?
The day one comes in under budget I will …… (insert own phrase here)
HS2 – some of the money has been spent on archaeology digs at the London end, and presumably on the compulsory purchase of the land there. Has anyone put in FOI requests?
you could try but I bet there’s a stone wall
It goes along with the question of why public projects often cost at least double first budgets and often finish way beyond the original completion date..
I did have a readily available memory list of projects which were notorious, but at the moment I can only recall to mind the “Barbican project” , the “British Library” and the Scottish Parliament building which if I remember was originally budgeted at £4million and ended up costing £40 million (and when there was already a suitable building already available).
The short answer I was usually given was that if ever a realistic budget was first put forward then there is every chance the project would be strangled at birth. Oh it doesn`t help that contracts often go to the contractor making the biggest tendering mistake.
The DOME
Err, now we have got it and it costs x million a month to maintain, what do we do with it – derrr?
Err, how about a faith exhibition, organised and run by someone of no faith at all – derr?
And don’t get me going on the Scottish Parliament Building – hand knitted from scraps, including the ceilings falling down . . .
The Scottish Parliament I seem to remember there was to be an investigation, wasn`t Kirsty Walke one of the committee.
Can`t remember seeing any results – I don`t suppose it`s tooo much to hope that one of the heads in a basket recently featured in conversations with that bonnie girl terrorists moll unearthed so skillfully by the Times in Syria is one of the buildings instigators.
Other possible answers are cronyism and corruption. Since a few years ago we have apparently tight legislation against corruption but it is of no use unless applied. Don’t make the mistake of considering corruption only happens in the “third world”. I am often remined of something Conan-Doyle wrote in one of his Holmes stories:
“When all probable causes have been eliminated that which remains, however improbable, must be the answer.”
I once worked for the UK subsidiary of a large US company, The CEO had been at it for years until he got greedy and fiddled VAT returns. They rely people thinking “they wouldn’t do that would they?”. Such people cannot be judged on our own values.
Brown sold a quantity (around 40 tonnes if I recall correctly) of “our” gold when he was PM. The manner in which the sales were conducted shifted the market and effectively obtained the lowest possible price for it. Could anyone be so stupid? The dip in the market is still known as “Brown’s Bottom”.
Very good article, more people need to be aware of this and start asking the same questions. If nobody questions anything, nobody gets held accountable.
In a nutshell, it is all to do with the massive diversion and siphoning off of public (taxpayers) money into the hands, pockets and bank accounts of private wealthy individuals/business/corporations (the “elites”), either directly or through hedge-fund schemes.
This also happens on a local government level, not just national. If anyone hasn’t already, please do watch this interesting documentary, then next time you hear your local council blaming ‘government cuts’ for their failure to deliver basic services, you will know why:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00UFYU_Gr7w
With larger schemes such as HS2, and local examples such as the Midland Metro tram extension in Birmingham, and the planned Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) development, contractors and developers will be richly rewarded for their endeavours – they’ll get their bonuses, huge salaries, and of course profits – leaving the public with unwanted transport systems that hardly anyone will use, and which will never recoup their massive financial outlay.
Excellent documentary Stuart. Most, if not all, councils perform the same or similar functions. Of course there are differences of scale. So why does it need separate consultancy contracts for individual councils rather than developing a model for all, obviously having regard for scalability?
I worked for a couple of councils large and small before moving the the private sector and would consider them to be models of inefficiency. However most staff were responsive to and supportive of changes to improve efficiency, at least in their engineering departments.
I’ve also worked with private consultants on business change projects but my employer always insisted that the Project Manager came from the business, not the consultant. It seems that most in government, both local and central, simply abdicate responsibility to the consultant with predictable results.
“It seems that most in government, both local and central, simply abdicate responsibility to the consultant with predictable results.”
It could be because they don’t have the professional expertise, only bureaucratic skills: skills that are needed in a bureaucracy to survive. 🙂
And it happens in the private sector as well!
Another benefit of so called supply chains.
Maligned as she was by many on the left Mrs Thatcher ensured that the Channel Tunnel was a minimal burden on the state coffers.
The worrying thing about this unaceptable use of public monies as Stephen outlines is that no-one is held accountable.
Government is out of control and it is costing the taxpayers a lot of money and loss of trust in government.
Surely,it is reasonable that a publicly accessible audit trail should be available for every government department decision involving the use of public money.