Readers of this column will be familiar with the seemingly never ending stream of reports from the likes of the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office as well as House of Lords Committees, highlighting critical failings in public sector procurement capabilities, particularly as they affect delivery of large scale construction and outsourcing projects.
Now the private sector is also coming in for a bit of what seems to be very well deserved flack, with the revelations from a Public Accounts Committee session over Crossrail’s overrun stunning those attending the session. A year ago Crossrail’s senior management was insisting that the £17.6 Billion railway – the Elizabeth Line – would be open in December last year.
That deadline has long since been recognised as fiction, but we now learn that the design of the Bond St station won’t even be completed until the tail end of this year, and it has separately emerged at a Transport for London Board meeting that there are some 250,000 ‘tasks’ still to be completed before the line opens – in March 2021, maybe. And it also emerges that £80 million is being spent by Crossrail to make the Canary Wharf end of the project ‘safe’.
Senior managers were insisting against all the evidence that must have been staring them in the face that the project was on time until the truth belatedly emerged last year. It is hard to believe that the senior team with all of its experience couldn’t see the problems developing. Yet nothing seems to have been done about them until the truth couldn’t be hidden any longer.
At least Crossrail’s new chief executive Mark Wild accepts that the overrun represents a failure, even if the project overall will still one day probably be judged a success – there have been some great engineering achievements on the project.
Although it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Transport for London, Crossrail, established by a Hybrid Bill, has been run as a separate company by managers imported from the private sector from its outset. Allegations from managers past and present call into question whether all of the project’s contractors were providing accurate and timely information regarding progress – which raises the question of how the client was monitoring that information. Not very thoroughly it seems.
Calls for an inquiry to be held in public are growing; the private sector doesn’t look like emerging from it with much credit.
Nick Barrett
Editor