So the Thames Lower Crossing Tunnel is set to cost more per mile than the high speed rail link. But 15 years in and a third of a billion pounds spent, and work has yet to begin.
In 2009 the Gordon Brown Labour government initially estimated that HS2 would cost £37.5bn in a 2019 review of the project, conducted by HS2’s chairman, Allan Cook, suggested that the final costs would be between £72.1 and £78.4bn (in 2015 prices).
Hinckley Point C in Somerset, has been under construction since 2016, is now expected to be finished by 2031 and cost up to £35bn with the original estimate being £25bn.
So why are we so bad at delivering infrastructure projects in the UK if you look over the water into Europe they seem to excel at these sort of things, and in Asia they can build massive infrastructure projects in a quarter of the time and at a fraction of the cost,
I know from my own experience working in government IT projects including the Post Office Horizon System at Fujitsu, The European Farming Subsidy Distribution System and DEFRA, and various Funding and Calculation systems at the Learning and Skills Council that scope creep and political interference can play a major part, and those two things go hand in hand with ministers changing their minds like the wind. But there has to be more to it than just bad government. As to be honest it doesn’t seem to matter who is in charge the disasters seem to be ingrained in our entire way of managing large projects.
A study by Boston Consulting Group earlier this year examined 1,600 infrastructure projects from around the world and found they cost more to deliver in the UK than Germany, France and rest of the Eurozone and take longer to deliver than in the US, Australia, France or the Eurozone.
But it is the comparison with Norway’s Laerdal tunnel that is perhaps most damning. While the planning application for the Lower Thames Crossing currently stands at £297m, the Norwegians built the world’s longest tunnel for less and with enough change to build the Eiksund Undersea Tunnel, which was the world’s longest undersea tunnel when it was built.
So that the hell is going on in the UK why can we not deliver anything on time or in budget, to be honest i don’t know the answer but i do know it has to change if we are going to start throwing billions of pounds away every year on failed and overrunning infrastructure projects, and if thing like the NHS have a prayer of modernising we really have got to get our shit together and start delivering.
