Politicians, wind your necks in on Crossrail

This teaser for the London Assembly’s #Crossrail report is unfair, and makes me cross! The report slams the project leadership, and obsesses over their “eye-watering salaries”, but shows little understanding of mega projects.

 

Their link is here.

Crossrail is not a “failure”.

The cost has gone up from £14.8bn, a downward revision guessed at in 2010, to a projected £17.6bn, a rise of about 19%.

It’s delayed. Work started in May 2009, and was meant to be done in December 2018. Now the target is December 2020: two years late, an increase in time of about 27%.

In the scheme of big projects, that’s pretty good.

And Crossrail is the biggest, most difficult, and most complex project the UK has seen in generations.

It makes Terminal Five and the Olympics/Paralympics look easy.

And it’s mostly done. A big issue now is integrating cutting-edge comms tech and software, which is still being written. This is all new territory for infrastructure.

But for easy points, politicians brand it a “failure”.

Should all those who toiled on Crossrail, from planners to project managers, now wipe it from their CVs because it ran over a bit? Give me a break!

Should lessons be learned? Of course, and I’ll be commenting on that this week as I digest various reports, because it says much about delegation.

But please, let’s have some perspective!