The Concorde and So On

Over budget and overdue were (and still are) characteristics in many U.K. public projects such as the Channel Tunnel and its rail link, the British Library, the Concorde, the Limehouse Link road tunnel, the Cardiff Bay Barrage, the Luton Airport extension, the Welsh Assembly, and the Scottish Parliament—the latter ending up at 11 times its original budget (£391 million) and 3 years overdue. The experience of several of London Transport’s projects over the 10-year period to 2000 is particularly striking. Against the background of managers’ insistence of long-time underfunding on the London Underground, the National Audit Office’s (NAO) conclusion that much of the £10 billion investment on the Jubilee Line Extension, the Docklands Light Railway, and the wider tube system —equivalent to more than 10% of the entire public sector investment during the period—was wasted because of a failure to integrate systems effectively. Where the story gets even more sobering is the conclusion by the NAO that these performance failures will recur in future investment projects “because learning from one project was not easily transferred to the next” (National Audit Office Report, September 2008).

There have been continuous safety and punctuality issues on the railways under both public and private ownership. Unable to improve its timetable sufficiently, the country’s largest railway defaulter, Thameslink, simply moved the goalposts by increasing the journey times of its trains in peak periods when the company was liable for the highest fines (The Times of London, 2003). These penalties cost it £2.2 million in 2002.

At the turn of the year 2000, 10 of the 27 planned millennial landmarks were similarly overdue or over budget, or both (Daily Mail, 2000). Overall in the public sector in 2001 the NAO found that slightly less than 75% of building projects were either over budget or overdue.