[Closed] Garden Bridge scrapped.

Joanna Lumleys campaign expenses?

Can we not bill Borris Johnson?

That's an insane amount of money

Iirc cyclists weren't allowed on it too

Could somebody explain how they have managed to squander £37.4 million

Consultants!

This whole thing has been a farcical vanity project from the word go.

And in my opinion it stands more than anything as a great big two fingers to the rest of the country from London

Austerity? What austerity? We might be closing all your libraries in the provinces that we clearly don't give a shit about, But at the same time we're going to spank millions of public money on this pointless vanity project, and we're going to use your money to do it, because... well... its London, and we're just soooooooooo much more important than you. And we want a bridge with some flowers on, so you can all just **** off!

Message received loud and clear!

Much like HS2 having spent over £1 billion so far and not an inch of track having been laid.

It's really easy to spend these huge amounts when it's someone else's money you're spending.

The thing about capitalism, you soon run out of other people's money.

Complete vanity project - the fact that they were proposing to exclude bikes and yet, bikes comprise a considerable proportion of traffic in central London.

What Binners said.

Bunch of self important arseholes.

Just think of the income tax take on those astronomical consultancy fees though..
Not being offshored in the Caymans, honest mate

Yes, exactly[b] binners[/b]; I can't help thinking that a tiny percentage of that money would have kept my local anti-natal unit open.

[b]@kimbers[/b] - misread your post as "Can we not [i]kill[/i] Boris Johnson?" and thought 'seems a little harsh, but not altogether unreasonable'!

local anti-natal unit open

I think (hope!) you mean antenatal!

^^LOL!^^ Yes.

And in my opinion it stands more than anything as a great big two fingers to the rest of the country from London

Excellent news, stupid vanity project glad someone had the balls to cancel it usually these things just keeps rolling on - in other news Mrs Mays vanity/diversionary project is going to cost the country about £100m 👿

Much like HS2 having spent over £1 billion so far and not an inch of track having been laid.

I love this public perception that engineering has.

[soapbox]

That the guy/girl in the orange jumpsuit and hardhat is the only one on the project that actually needs to be paid and just turns up at a station in NW London some day in 2018 and starts laying track in the general direction of Birmingham and hoping for the best.

The public will then moan that even they're paid too much because they 'only' works 4 hours a day as they're on a night shift so can't start work until the line is made safe after the last train and has to finish early enough that the line can be handed back before the fist commuter train.

And then we wonder why kids in China are so much more enthused about STEM subjects when that's the public opinion over here......

[/soapbox]

Don't worry your average Londoner would much rather have seen the money spent on something else.

Especially as it was my even going to be fully open to the public

The thing about capitalism, you soon run out of other people's money.

I think you'll find that's Communism.

I think (hope!) you mean antenatal!

He really meant Aunty Natelie.

And in my opinion it stands more than anything as a great big two fingers to the rest of the country from London

What makes you think the majority of Londoners wanted it?

Makes The Circuit Of Wales squandering of public money a mere drop in the ocean!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-39706499

What makes you think the majority of Londoners wanted it?

I must have missed him saying that....

Another £10 million because we've underwritten cancellation fees too. Money for nothing...

I actually really liked the [i]idea[/i] but as time went on it got more and more broken. Pretty much no part of it makes any sense now and the more you look, the dodgier it gets. Of course Boris'll get away scot free...

For all of those who wish to slag London off....

Most of us thought the idea was bollox too...

Slag off those who've proffed from the debacle but bloody well leave us Londoners, the normal folk who live here who are remarkably similar to you, out of your lazy stereotyping.

Save your venom for those who deserve it!

Another thing that is a bit puzzling is the fuzzy boundary between public and private property. If the thing had been built, would it have been "public" in any sense, despite the use of our cash?

I have recently been trying to organise a photo event in London, and discovered that many of the places I imagined to be "public property" are in fact owned by City of London Corporation, and patrolled by rentacops who prevent photography on the grounds that it is "private land".

It seems to me that we have sleepwalked into a situation where what we thought of as "ours" has been sold from under our feet. Soon we will have to pay Oxygen Plc for permission to breathe.

I think you'll find that's Communism.

I think you'll find a large whooshing noise above your head 🙂

Excellent news, total waste of money.

My worry is Kahn is cosying up to the lefty Paris neighbour over "environmental" changes she is making which have been a disaster - digging up roads and replacing them with flower pots. Result = massive traffic jams and more pollution (some of it in neighbouring mayor's districts so she doesn't care). Businesses suffering as people don't bother to drive into Paris for dinner.

Also for those complaining about cancellation fees this is same issue the Tories faced over the Millenium Dome. They couldn't cancel it due to contracts signed by Labour.

@thisisnotaspoon 🙂

lefty Paris neighbour over "environmental" changes she is making

Interesting that concern for the environment is seen as a "lefty" issue. Does that mean that the fascists have plainly confirmed that money trumps (pun sort-of intended) health?

I love this public perception that engineering has.

My comments were nothing to do with a perception of engineering. I realise that there's a huge amount of work goes on with projects like this before anything appears.
My comment was more about the amount of money that's being poured into a project which will, in my opinion, be a colossal waste of money.

Slag off those who've proffed from the debacle but bloody well leave us Londoners, the normal folk who live here who are remarkably similar to you, out of your lazy stereotyping.

Save your venom for those who deserve it!

put your handbag away love

DrJ - Member

Another thing that is a bit puzzling is the fuzzy boundary between public and private property. If the thing had been built, would it have been "public" in any sense, despite the use of our cash?

To focus the mind here, remember that much of the public money came from the Department of Transport. It's as much a public space as it is a transport link.

Who needs public libraries when the money can be better pissed away on the non supply of an aquatic allotment?

Bury is cutting 10 of its 14 libraries and now has exactly zero park rangers.

DrJ - Member
I think you'll find that's Communism.
I think you'll find a large whooshing noise above your head

To be a pedant, it's Socialism, but yeah... Whoosh!

Much like HS2 having spent over £1 billion so far and not an inch of track having been laid.

I love this public perception that engineering has.

[soapbox]

That the guy/girl in the orange jumpsuit and hardhat is the only one on the project that actually needs to be paid and just turns up at a station in NW London some day in 2018 and starts laying track in the general direction of Birmingham and hoping for the best.

The public will then moan that even they're paid too much because they 'only' works 4 hours a day as they're on a night shift so can't start work until the line is made safe after the last train and has to finish early enough that the line can be handed back before the fist commuter train.

And then we wonder why kids in China are so much more enthused about STEM subjects when that's the public opinion over here......

[/soapbox]

+1 - totally agree.

I love this public perception that engineering has.

I get that professional people need paying good money to sort things out (I'm a lawyer, I'm not averse to charging people five hundred quid for an hour's work that'll). I still find the idea of 37 [b]milllion[/b] quid for thinking about building a bridge [i]fairly[/i] mind-boggling.

Anyone got a rough breakdown of where all that money goes?

...........I'm a lawyer, I'm not averse to charging people five hundred quid for an hour's work...................

Anyone got a rough breakdown of where all that money goes?

I think I took home £15 for every £115 the client got billed for my time on my last project. So that's ~70 engineers for 2 years? That does seem a lot for engineering a bridge. So someones obviously made some profit.

You'd have to do surveys etc, have core samples of the riverbed taken etc which probably weren't cheap, but even so.

And lawyers. It's was probably 74,000 hours of lawyers at £500/hour and an engineer at the end saying "you want to put trees on a bridge? That'll never work" and then it gets canceled.

In fairness there's **** all to do in London. A garden bridge would have made it worthwhile to visit.

In fairness there's **** all to do in London. A garden bridge would have made it worthwhile to visit.

Mehhhhhh.........
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_museums_in_London

It's was probably 74,000 hours of lawyers at £500/hour and an engineer at the end...

Probably disturbingly accurate. 🙂

We might be closing all your libraries in the provinces that we clearly don't give a shit about,

The public libraries act was passed in 1850 and the first library opened in Manchester in 1852. At that time it's estimated 20% of children in Manchester died before their 5th birthday. Better go and firebomb those libraries binners 🙂

And yes this bridge is utter madness, but if it had of been built in 150 years no one would think about what it had really cost. The real cost of anything is not measured in money but in what you don't do as a result of what you have done.

bodgy - Member 
Could somebody explain how they have managed to squander £37.4 million (MILLION!!) of public funds

That's money going to businesses who pay wages and suppliers (inc other consultants, architects etc) who are paying wages, to employees and contractors who pay taxes, and buy things with more taxes which go to companies who pay those taxes back to... the government and back into public funds.

Okay, only a percentage of the £37.4 million as much of it goes to profit and sits in people's accounts for years, but then they'll eventually buy things with it, which pays for salaries, taxes, etc

However I do agree it seemed a waste of a project, but then so are many things and at least it's not yet more luxury housing for foreign investors and is still more useful than HS2.

thisisnotaspoon - Member

In fairness there's **** all to do in London. A garden bridge would have made it worthwhile to visit.

Mehhhhhh.........
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_museums_in_London

Ok fair enough but there's no big parks or zoos or any type of outside things to do are there?

For the removal of doubt 😉 and one for my other post 😉

Also think how much the Houses of Parliament are really going to cost to fix...

Ok fair enough but there's no big parks or zoos or any type of outside things to do are there?

Big parks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parks_and_open_spaces_in_London

Zoo:
www.zsl.org

😉

Engineering consultants, Architects, Environmental Consultants, Heritage Consultants, Public Consultation Costs, Horticulural Consultants, Lawyers, Accountants, Penalty charges etc etc.

Mehhhhhh.........
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_museums_in_London
br />

This sounds like one of those projects that should never have got off the drawing board, that successive people have let carry on because they don't want to be the one who killed it because they'd be blamed for the spend up to that point.

We have/had one going on here in Wales for, oh about 2 years. "Circuit of Wales" a £425m project or 'scam' to build a international racing circuit in middle of nowhere - the backers made wild claims about securing races from MotoGP and F1, how it would be the basis for a World Motorsport Hub and how it couldn't lose money - it's been scrapped 3 times already because the Welsh government refuse to underwrite the cost (which in this case would be the same as just paying for it, because no one else wants to) but everytime they come back with wilder and wilder claims for it and even go as far as to claim private backers are interested. They've managed to burn through £10m of public money so far, partly on gardening for one of the directors and on a motorsport company HQ in England.

For reference, whilst £425m isn't massive in terms of public sector spending, it's worth considering that Silverstone - which does have a F1 race and will likely always have an F1 race has been for sale for £33m for quite some time, no takers.

deadkenny - Member

That's money going to businesses who pay wages and suppliers (inc other consultants, architects etc) who are paying wages, to employees and contractors who pay taxes, and buy things with more taxes which go to companies who pay those taxes back to... the government and back into public funds.

And that'd also be true if they'd spent the same amount of money on something that wasn't a pointless pile of **** and that got cancelled. So it's not much of a defence really

This sounds like one of those projects that should never have got off the drawing board, that successive people have let carry on because they don't want to be the one who killed it because they'd be blamed for the spend up to that point.

Umm no, that is charmingly naive - it has carried on because influential people stood to make a shed load of money from it, siphoning cash from tax payers into their own bank accounts - Tory business as usual.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/28/garden-bridge-dead-38m-public-money-repaid-boris-johnson

would it have been "public" in any sense, despite the use of our cash?

No.

I'd expect there's some almost criminal goings on behind the scenes here. Boris seems to have skipped all the regular checks and balances to hand over large chunks of taxpayers money to build a corporate entertainment space.

The Guardian article gives an insight into how it was justified... a predicted income of 200k from "T-shirts and pens"
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2015/mar/04/revealed-boris-johnson-duplicitous-handling-garden-bridge-london

Oh yes. Circuit of Wales. I saw the support for it on the home page here once and thought "Really STW? Would a couple of miles of blues make a dead idea work?"
Oh a quick check and it seems that has had over £9,000,000 so far given to it.

And in my opinion it stands more than anything as a great big two fingers to the rest of the country from London

You'd be as hard pushed to find anyone in London who supported it as you would anywhere else in the country to be fair

[b]@deadkenny[/b] - Yeah, I hear what you're saying; lots of overpriced London biased money to conceptual consultancies, PR firms, political lobbyist consultants, message modifiers, financial climate pioneers etc etc etc.

Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B parasites.

The lot of them. Parasites.

That money should be spent on (in no particular order)

-schools
-doctors and nurses and bum wipers
-social services
-libraries
-colleges
-mental health

None of it should be going towards self serving cun-wats, who are only too happy to dive onto a gravy train vanity project.

Especially a vanity project for Johnson, the man who has broken this country for a couple of decades.

Perhaps we should 'bill' him?

The sad thing is we just can't do 'big' public engineering in this country any more. Too many NIMBYs, Too many lawyers needed, Too many people taking Too big a cut.

Lets face it, it's a pretty short bridge, with some trees on it, hardly the most difficult engineering task to do, yet the politics have killed it, after years of expensive arguing.......

as people don't bother to drive into Paris for dinner.

I should flimmin hope not too. If they are bothered, they'll find an alternative means of transport or eat locally.

"The sad thing is we just can't do 'big' public engineering in this country any more."

Overpopulation.

[b]@outofbreath[/b] - for the purposes of general understanding, and validating your own comment; would you care to expand upon what you mean by "overpopulation"?

. . . lest the good folk of STW assume the worst about your agenda?

maxtorque - Member

Lets face it, it's a pretty short bridge, with some trees on it, hardly the most difficult engineering task to do

It's nothing to do with the engineering- you say politics killed it but really only politics, and vested interests, created it in the first place and kept it on life support. As soon as the politics stopped it died.

When the bridge isn't a pointless vanity project designed to soak up public money for private purposes, this happens, so don't tell me we can't do big engineering any more:

[img] [/img]

"@outofbreath - for the purposes of general understanding, and validating your own comment; would you care to expand upon what you mean by "overpopulation"?"

I mean too many people.

France (for example) just doesn't have these problems. There's always somewhere to put a new road or airport.

We need 8 lane motorway between Brighton and Bournemouth. There's nowhere to put it.

When the bridge isn't a pointless vanity project designed to soak up public money for private purposes, this happens, so don't tell me we can't do big engineering any more:

So long as it doesn't have a cycle lane 😀

Big parks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parks_and_open_spaces_in_London

Meh!!!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairngorms_National_Park

Also think how much the Houses of Parliament are really going to cost to fix...

A whole lot more than it would cost to build a new parliament building somewhere else?

[b]@outofbreath[/b] - fair enough. It is indeed a crowded little island. And the French do a fine line in bridges (I've been there and driven / cycled over a few).

Yet this particular bridge was never about necessity, was it? Political ego, yes. Necessity; no.

A whole lot more than it would cost to build a new parliament building somewhere else?

Spot on. Well said.

Wow, the "whoosh" is strong in this thread 😀

so don't tell me we can't do big engineering any more:

Well from that pic, it looks like we can't. There's massive gaps in it!

+1 from a Londoner that Londoners didn't support the idea of the bridge either. Despite London looking pretty wealthy at the moment, there's a lot of anger that the city's being sold from underneath our feet to (not always legit) international money and tearing out the soul of the place. Let alone the amount of money laundering that's gone on and made it totally unaffordable to live there anymore...

The sad thing is we just can't do 'big' public engineering in this country any more.

Not totally true, think 2nd Severn bridge crossing in the 90's and new Forth Bridge now. Also there have been a heck of a lot of big stadiums built across the UK over the last 20 years e.g. Millenium in Cardiff, City of Manchester, Glasgow Velodrome complex and then there was the whole Olympics thing.

More civil engineering - crossrail, hs2 (ignoring the politics), st pancras, kings cross, birmingham new street, national grid hv tunnels under london, thames tideway super-sewer.

I know i'm being deliberately awkward here and that list isn't doesn't cover every civil engineering project in the UK. But...

London, train to London, London, London, not London, London and London.

It would have been money well spent had the thing collapsed into the Thames at its opening party, taking all the vanity pillocks with it.

This sorry business has certainly taken the enjoyment out of watching New Avengers repeats 🙁 Purdey's bob does start to look a lot like Boris's infantile hair style.

Don't worry the U.K. Isn't the only country good at wasting public money on vanity projects. You just need to look at the Berlin Brandenburg Airport fiasco to see how public money can really be wasted.

@harry - fair point but they were only intended to be some high profile examples, not an exhaustive list; HS2 could be described as 'train to birmingham with intermediate stops at new stations, travelling through new tunnels etc'

The next time some well connected people propose a public-private scheme they should be ignored unless they can prove irrevocable commitments from private donors for at least 50% of the projected construction cost - with funds into escrow account or similar; all pre-construction costs to be 100% funded by private donors/backers; cost projections to be thoroughly tested; claimed economic or regenerative benefits to be independently reviewed a la Hodge; fully transparent process from concept to design (competition), tender, evaluation and contract awards; completed scheme to be available for private hire, if applicable, on legally limited number of occasions annually - and never to the detriment of public use or enjoyment.

So - £37 million of (largely) public money spent; what about OJEU compliance which is a key requirement in public spending?
Non-compliance with the regs is an offence and can carry significant penalties. From my understanding I would say Johnson should be in the firing line.

I'm pleased it's been canned but it's yet more money pissed away which could have been used beneficially - multiple posts above refer.

Has anyone attempted to tot up the cost of mega projects initiated by government over the past say 10 years which have been aborted or failed to deliver or have been subject to budget overruns or delayed delivery? Private Eye shine a light on some of these and the usual culprits are C(r)apita and major IT companies - mustn't forget civil servants and ministers being seduced by the thought of shiny new all singing, all dancing interconnected systems.

The sad thing is we just can't do 'big' public [s]engineering[/s] anything in this country any more [b]because the whole shitty place is devoted to funneling money into private pockets.[/b]

FTFY