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Post by redbus on May 3, 2019 11:50:45 GMT
The National Audit Office have released a report on Crossrail. I've not read it but have some excerpts on Twitter. It makes for pretty horrific reading. Some of the estimated costs for the stations against their original budgets are astounding - Whitechapel is almost 6 times the original budget (£659m vs £110m) www.nao.org.uk/report/crossrail/www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Completing-Crossrail.pdfAnd worth looking at the dates when things were already clearly going wrong and very poor decisions were being made - i.e. before the current Mayor took over. This is a mess that is long in the making. And that is NOT me trying to make the current Mayor blameless but just pointing out that all the "on time, on budget" stuff being spouted by his opponents about the project before he was elected are equally deluded about the reality of the situation. It was going wrong in 2015! In all honesty I have not been impressed with any of our Mayors, and it comes as no surprise that things started to go wrong under the previous Mayor. To be fair back in 2015 there was still time to put matters right, and the key problem appears to have been at Crossrail where the poor decisions were made. To be fair to both Mayors it is very difficult to do anything when Crossrail management are stating 'we are opening on schedule'. I do however put a certain blame on the current Mayor which I put much less on previous Mayor, as under the current Mayor there has been a lot more noise of problems at Crossrail that he should have had investigated and cross-questioned the management about. Maybe he did and was sufficiently re-assured, in which case given what has happened, one has to ask whether he questioned enough. It is also a case of what the Mayor can / should reasonably have done without the benefit of hindsight.
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Post by snoggle on May 3, 2019 12:10:39 GMT
In all honesty I have not been impressed with any of our Mayors, and it comes as no surprise that things started to go wrong under the previous Mayor. To be fair back in 2015 there was still time to put matters right, and the key problem appears to have been at Crossrail where the poor decisions were made. To be fair to both Mayors it is very difficult to do anything when Crossrail management are stating 'we are opening on schedule'. I do however put a certain blame on the current Mayor which I put much less on previous Mayor, as under the current Mayor there has been a lot more noise of problems at Crossrail that he should have had investigated and cross-questioned the management about. Maybe he did and was sufficiently re-assured, in which case given what has happened, one has to ask whether he questioned enough. It is also a case of what the Mayor can / should reasonably have done without the benefit of hindsight. The fundamental problem was the governance arrangements. The whole thing was designed to be at "arm's length" with Crossrail having a lot of autonomy. Looking at the cost numbers it's clear the tunnelling costs were about right EDIT - I misread the table. Everything else was wrong. I've not read the report yet but the little I've seen via social media points to some appallingly bad procurement decisions, wrong strategic decisions, wrong management decisions and ludicrous "project management" processes. I'm not a trained PM but I know enough of the basics to see a mess. I'm also not a trained procurement person but again can spot the flaws. I am not saying there is a magic answer here - there are risks with whatever structure / contracts you have. However throwing money at people is not "management". I suspect the Mayor did ask questions but he had no right to send in auditors or basically call Crossrail liars. He had no ability to go in and pull the rug out from underneath Crossrail's management to find out what was wrong. An "informed source" on another blog has been saying for over a year what was going wrong and when and the NAO report is the first that aligns with what they were saying. When I met an old colleague a few weeks ago they said "we all knew it was hopelessly late and wouldn't open on time" and they didn't work on Crossrail. The gossip machine was putting that message round TfL. Doesn't the Commissioner have some people who relay the gossip to him? Any decent leader has that sort of informal comms network. If we ever get a large scale transport project in the future the danger is that it will be so hamstrung by governance arrangements that nothing will ever get done. There is a fine balance to be drawn between trusting competent skilled people to get on with a difficult job and also having sufficient depth of oversight and access to info that you can spot quickly when things are not right and require those who are accountable to explain and take mitigating action. No excessive duplication but the right level of control and intrusion when needed.
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Post by danorak on May 3, 2019 16:25:17 GMT
The National Audit Office have released a report on Crossrail. I've not read it but have some excerpts on Twitter. It makes for pretty horrific reading. Some of the estimated costs for the stations against their original budgets are astounding - Whitechapel is almost 6 times the original budget (£659m vs £110m) www.nao.org.uk/report/crossrail/www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Completing-Crossrail.pdfAnd worth looking at the dates when things were already clearly going wrong and very poor decisions were being made - i.e. before the current Mayor took over. This is a mess that is long in the making. And that is NOT me trying to make the current Mayor blameless but just pointing out that all the "on time, on budget" stuff being spouted by his opponents about the project before he was elected are equally deluded about the reality of the situation. It was going wrong in 2015! More than a bit of hubris around TfL and Crossrail. I was at Whitechapel a couple of days ago and it's so far off as to be laughable.
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Post by redbus on May 3, 2019 16:33:58 GMT
In all honesty I have not been impressed with any of our Mayors, and it comes as no surprise that things started to go wrong under the previous Mayor. To be fair back in 2015 there was still time to put matters right, and the key problem appears to have been at Crossrail where the poor decisions were made. To be fair to both Mayors it is very difficult to do anything when Crossrail management are stating 'we are opening on schedule'. I do however put a certain blame on the current Mayor which I put much less on previous Mayor, as under the current Mayor there has been a lot more noise of problems at Crossrail that he should have had investigated and cross-questioned the management about. Maybe he did and was sufficiently re-assured, in which case given what has happened, one has to ask whether he questioned enough. It is also a case of what the Mayor can / should reasonably have done without the benefit of hindsight. The fundamental problem was the governance arrangements. The whole thing was designed to be at "arm's length" with Crossrail having a lot of autonomy. Looking at the cost numbers it's clear the tunnelling costs were about right EDIT - I misread the table. Everything else was wrong. I've not read the report yet but the little I've seen via social media points to some appallingly bad procurement decisions, wrong strategic decisions, wrong management decisions and ludicrous "project management" processes. I'm not a trained PM but I know enough of the basics to see a mess. I'm also not a trained procurement person but again can spot the flaws. I am not saying there is a magic answer here - there are risks with whatever structure / contracts you have. However throwing money at people is not "management". I suspect the Mayor did ask questions but he had no right to send in auditors or basically call Crossrail liars. He had no ability to go in and pull the rug out from underneath Crossrail's management to find out what was wrong. An "informed source" on another blog has been saying for over a year what was going wrong and when and the NAO report is the first that aligns with what they were saying. When I met an old colleague a few weeks ago they said "we all knew it was hopelessly late and wouldn't open on time" and they didn't work on Crossrail. The gossip machine was putting that message round TfL. Doesn't the Commissioner have some people who relay the gossip to him? Any decent leader has that sort of informal comms network. If we ever get a large scale transport project in the future the danger is that it will be so hamstrung by governance arrangements that nothing will ever get done. There is a fine balance to be drawn between trusting competent skilled people to get on with a difficult job and also having sufficient depth of oversight and access to info that you can spot quickly when things are not right and require those who are accountable to explain and take mitigating action. No excessive duplication but the right level of control and intrusion when needed. Indeed, and the governance structure makes it much more difficult. I can see the reasoning for having the arms-length structure, but it only works when the project management works, which it appears was not the case here. Also arms-length is never quite like that because people will always blame the politicians (correctly in my view) when it comes to public money and projects like Crossrail as they are democratically accountable, and that cannot be delegated to an arms-length organisation.
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Post by snoggle on May 3, 2019 16:52:02 GMT
More than a bit of hubris around TfL and Crossrail. I was at Whitechapel a couple of days ago and it's so far off as to be laughable. When I went on one of the organised site visits to Whitechapel it was obvious it was a very long way behind. I asked two of the officials if it would be ready on time and all I got was studied silence and awkward looks on their faces. That told me all I needed to know.
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Post by snoggle on May 3, 2019 16:58:08 GMT
Indeed, and the governance structure makes it much more difficult. I can see the reasoning for having the arms-length structure, but it only works when the project management works, which it appears was not the case here. Also arms-length is never quite like that because people will always blame the politicians (correctly in my view) when it comes to public money and projects like Crossrail as they are democratically accountable, and that cannot be delegated to an arms-length organisation. I rather suspect the "arms length" aspect was forced through by the DfT and Treasury on entirely political grounds to stop a London Mayor from "interferring". I don't know when the arrangements were put in place but if before 2008 then it was to stop Ken Livingstone meddling. If later then I doubt very much Boris Johnson, famously lacking in any interest in detail, would have cared very much about such an arrangement. He almost certainly knew, even in 2008, that he'd not be Mayor come 2018 anyway.
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Post by redbus on May 3, 2019 17:19:03 GMT
More than a bit of hubris around TfL and Crossrail. I was at Whitechapel a couple of days ago and it's so far off as to be laughable. When I went on one of the organised site visits to Whitechapel it was obvious it was a very long way behind. I asked two of the officials if it would be ready on time and all I got was studied silence and awkward looks on their faces. That told me all I needed to know. You did better than I. I was also at the Whitechapel site visit and was assured everything was set for opening in December 2018!!!. Your questioning must have been better than mine.
We could have the sweepstake for Bond Street.......which year will host the site visit !
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Post by John tuthill on May 3, 2019 18:17:00 GMT
When I went on one of the organised site visits to Whitechapel it was obvious it was a very long way behind. I asked two of the officials if it would be ready on time and all I got was studied silence and awkward looks on their faces. That told me all I needed to know. You did better than I. I was also at the Whitechapel site visit and was assured everything was set for opening in December 2018!!!. Your questioning must have been better than mine.
We could have the sweepstake for Bond Street.......which year will host the site visit !
Rumour has it Captain Kirk is going to open it.
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Post by snoggle on May 8, 2019 9:37:46 GMT
A tiny bit of hopeful news for the western end of Crossrail. Contracts to rebuild several stations have finally been awarded by Network Rail. HOCTIEF are the successful contractor.
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Post by george on May 8, 2019 9:56:14 GMT
A tiny bit of hopeful news for the western end of Crossrail. Contracts to rebuild several stations have finally been awarded by Network Rail. HOCTIEF are the successful contractor. Same contractor who have recently done Reading station.
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Post by snoggle on May 8, 2019 12:02:00 GMT
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Post by rif153 on May 9, 2019 16:17:00 GMT
A tiny bit of hopeful news for the western end of Crossrail. Contracts to rebuild several stations have finally been awarded by Network Rail. HOCTIEF are the successful contractor.
Did Network Rail do the platform extensions and new staircase at Ealing Broadway then?
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Post by snoggle on May 9, 2019 16:43:08 GMT
A tiny bit of hopeful news for the western end of Crossrail. Contracts to rebuild several stations have finally been awarded by Network Rail. HOCTIEF are the successful contractor.
Did Network Rail do the platform extensions and new staircase at Ealing Broadway then? I believe Network Rail did some elements of work at a number of stations over the long possession at Xmas and New Year. This was to avoid wasting such a valuable amount of time given such large scale possessions are very rare and difficult to organise. Not sure if it covered platforms or not but it certainly covered things like stairs and bridges and lift towers. I've seen some evidence of the work at Ealing and Acton Main Line as I actually caught a TfL Rail train into Paddington a couple of weeks ago.
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Post by redbus on May 9, 2019 19:07:49 GMT
Did Network Rail do the platform extensions and new staircase at Ealing Broadway then? I believe Network Rail did some elements of work at a number of stations over the long possession at Xmas and New Year. This was to avoid wasting such a valuable amount of time given such large scale possessions are very rare and difficult to organise. Not sure if it covered platforms or not but it certainly covered things like stairs and bridges and lift towers. I've seen some evidence of the work at Ealing and Acton Main Line as I actually caught a TfL Rail train into Paddington a couple of weeks ago. Sorry, is this the same Crossrail that was supposed open in 2018? Awarding contracts in 2019 for a railway supposed to open in 2018........mmmm interesting.
Yes, I do realise that those stations were not due for a 2018 opening, but nevertheless I am sure you see the point I am trying to make
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Post by Deleted on May 16, 2019 4:31:42 GMT
I can’t help but wonder where all the pomp and glory offered up by enthusiastic young project managers have gone, as portrayed in the CrossRail documentary aired earlier in the year.
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