COMMENT Another week, and another major construction project is delayed amid skyrocketing costs.
The whole project is now forecast to go 45% over budget. Delivery, originally slated for October 2020, is not now expected until May 2023 – 31 months late.
It is a build that could hardly be higher profile. Millions of eyeballs already cast a critical eye over this iconic stretch of London most days of the week, and the developers hope to grow that number as the project reaches the delivery phase.
Scrutiny is stepping up. This week auditors questioned whether the project is delivering value for money. Public money is funding the build, so attention is inevitable. The delivery team of 20 full-time-equivalent staff – plus a supporting cast of contractors, including architects, engineers, quantity surveyors and cost consultants – will be watched closely.
All parties admit that the programme remains “high risk” and lessons have already been learnt. “Insufficient construction project management expertise contributed to a lack of appropriate technical challenge, inadequate integration between the programme team and end users, and early planning processes led to underestimation of aspects of complexity, cost and risks of its revised approach,” say the auditors. Ouch.
Now, additional resources to manage the main construction contract have been put in place but, like so many other projects these days, construction contract costs are running higher than expected, thanks in no small part to sector inflation. Contingencies have had to be found and the owner has “significantly increased its funding to cover known and unknown risks”.
So where is this project?
The postcode is E20, the iconic London location of Albert Square. The owner is the BBC, and the “programme” (in a construction and TV sense) EastEnders.
And while the end product may be fiction, the project and the overruns are very much fact.
The parallels with so much that happens in the real world of the built environment are irresistible. And this EastEnders plot line is perhaps a rare case of art mirroring life these days.
After another week in politics that we might all prefer was fiction rather than fact (though it would surely be too far-fetched to get past a soap opera’s script editor) life is mirroring art too often.
So when Ian Hislop took to the stage at the Story of Christmas charity event at The Dorchester hotel on Wednesday night to tell several hundred guests that despite Theresa May’s surviving a vote of no confidence he had been asked to form a government of national unity, it sounded plausible, desirable even.
Will 2019 bring calm, certainty and, to Westminster, pragmatism? If they are on your Christmas list for this year, you may be disappointed. Keep asking next Christmas.
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