Throwing money into the wishing well
In February, it was announced that the failed London Garden Bridge project had been wound up at a total cost of over fifty million pounds, and at least half of that came out of the public purse.
The London Garden Bridge project was set up back in 2014 and was intended to be a pedestrianised bridge across the River Thames, on the stretch of river between the Waterloo and Blackfriars bridges. The bridge would be more like a narrow park than a bridge in the conventional sense, an oasis of green in the city, and the proponents said it would be used by thousands of Londoners each day and help regenerate the city.
The project was championed by then London Mayor, Boris Johnson. Transport for London was promising £30m in funds, and a further £30m was to be provided by the Department for Transport, with the rest coming from private funding. In 2016, it became apparent that the project costs were escalating, and the bridge was cancelled when the new London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, refused any more public funding.
In February 2019, a final report on the project was released detailing the finances, from which it was revealed that it incurred loses of £53.5m, without any construction work having started, of which £24m came from Transport for London, and £19m from the Department for Transport. 40% of the losses were payments to French construction company Bouygues. Other expenses included £148,000 on a computer-generated image of what the bridge would look like, over £400,000 on a gala dinner in Battersea to woo potential donors, and most surprisingly from my point of view, an eye-watering £160,000 on its website.
For £160,000 over a two year period, I'd expect to get a pretty impressive website. The website was quickly removed after the project failed and now just shows a holding page, but thanks to the Internet Archive service, we can still find a snapshot taken shortly before the contract was cancelled. So this is what a £160K website looks like:
Let's be honest, that website is bland and formulaic, there is nothing technically challenging about it, and very little in the way of content, apart from the usual legalese gibberish about terms and conditions. The Guardian described it as "adequate but unexceptional". I can't begin to imagine how the developers have justified this cost. Also to be found under the comms and media heading in the Garden Bridge accounts is the information that they clocked up £58,000 on video, presumably that's the one they used on the website, £38,000 on agency fees (probably writing press releases), and £30,000 on business plan consultancy. These inflated costs must be commonplace because no-one seems to have batted an eye over them.
It is surprising that in these harsh economic times that so much public money can be given away with so little scrutiny or accountability, and this is a seriously large amount of money to have wasted. It would have been cheaper to just throw £70,000 worth of bank notes into the Thames each and every day for two years than it was to finance this project.
27th February 2019
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.