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£400 million!
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Just when you thought the Scottish parliament couldn't get any more expensive, the price has now topped £400 million. Its about time they changed the contract.
A cap should have been put on the price and if any contractor went over budget, tough shit. As it stands, the taxpayers are being treated like a money tree. This has to stop now. The sooner the inquiry into the costs of the new building is finished, the better.
A cap should have been put on the price and if any contractor went over budget, tough shit. As it stands, the taxpayers are being treated like a money tree. This has to stop now. The sooner the inquiry into the costs of the new building is finished, the better.
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It'll probably end up like Portcullis House in Westminster, expensive and completely useless. You should have got the guy who did City Hall here in London. :yes:
The project itself is intended to replace what is known as the SouthEast Expressway with an underground harbour tunnel (the third harbour tunnel actually) as well as autoroute. Once built and operational the intention is to dismantle the existing elevated expressway that runs through the back bay area (skirting Boston Harbour).
Some informative links on the project can be found here:
http://boston.about.com/library/weekly/aabigdiga.htm?PM=ss16_boston
I must say that getting rid of the elevated expressway would make the place look much better. That doesn't mean the project should cost billions and billions though.[/shameless derailment].
Back to the topic in hand, there is certainly something very rotten when it comes to building projects in this country. Be a railway, road, football stadium or building, we seem to pay literally 2 to 3 times more than anyone else in the world would pay.
I blame our culture of privatisation and endless sub-contracting.
The real sham is that rather than persecute the original chief for graft and fraud (at the national level too since Washington had to bail out the project during the Clinton admin) they actually had the gall to simply let him go with a sweet 250,000 dollar personal settlement (on top of the millions if not billions he illicitly expropriated.
It's gonna be such a huge waste of money that it hurts to think about. It could have been put to such good use....
Take Customs and Excise- they sell all their property to an offshore company at below market value, then pay above market value to rent it back.
Take the Inland Revenue- FDujitsu put in a computer system that doesnt work, then ask for more money outside of the contract to put it right, even though repairs was part of the initial contract.
Take a school in Brighton which was built with a clause for a extension, yet the compnay running it (our good old friends Jarvis) are refusing to put in the extension unless millions of pounds of public money is given to them by way of "compensation".
Private companies have one ambition- profit. And people who cannot choose a competitor- like the Government- are milked as a cash cow. Although admittedly this is mostly because the Government are getting comission into anonymous bank accounts in Jersey for every pound that the PFI goes up by.