Jetty’s £11m. ‘overspend’ was still good value, says PSD
Saturday 1st May 2010, 1:00PM BST.
The £11m. extra spent on the New Jetty led to calls for control of capital projects to be centralised. (Picture by Steve Sarre, 0948428)
ALTHOUGH it cost £11m. more than originally budgeted, Public Services minister Bernard Flouquet was adamant the States got value for money with the New Jetty project.
The issue was raised by several members during yesterday’s debate on PSD’s report on the New Jetty, in which the department detailed the final costs of the project.
The former Board of Administration had control of the project after it was approved by the States in 2001. It was allocated a budget of £3.3m. to have the work carried out. It eventually cost £14.3m. after it was discovered that the jetty needed more repairs than originally thought and after a long legal dispute over costs with the contractor.
But Deputy Flouquet suggested the project did not qualify as an ‘overspend’ as the States had failed in the first instance to fully establish an accurate figure of how much the repairs would cost. He believed the original budget was a severe underestimate of the work required.
‘If you estimate the actual work carried out that we paid for, apart from legal fees, I would suggest we did get value for money despite how we got there,’ he said.
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Well why not simply pay for the work that was carried out & save the taxpayers a small fortune in arguing the toss over the final costings then?
I bet the advocates firm are not complaining at all. Maybe their time should be investigated as a final evaluation into the fiasco.
It all seems a bit rich for me. Easy money when it is not your own though.
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Its a shame we dont get value for money in Bernie
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The problem was that the real cost of repairing that jetty was about 12 million and it was an inadequate survey carried out by people who were simply not up to the task, that resulted in a woefully under priced repair based on this flimsy survey. Unfortunately the States voted for it based on the information they were given. When it became apparent that the job was huge and that the jetty was in much worse state than we could have imagined, Deputy Berry came back to the States and asked for a blank cheque to finish the work. It was to put it mildly a disaster from beginning to end.
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Dave Jones
So based on your assesment why and who instructed the lawyers? Thats a fair question isnt it? Why not just accept the facts as you have put them and pay up?
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Dave Jones
Deputy Berry wanting a blank cheque? Surely not, that wouldn’t be like him at all would it?
How many of those did he have over the years I wonder?
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Simon
Because the contractors tried to claim 27 million
and the States had to fight that claim, it is no more complicated than that.
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Dave Jones
Thanks, I accept that sometimes there is a perfectly justafiable reason.
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The entertaining thing here is that from now on repairs will have to be on-budget. But to get the budget right, we’ll be spending millions extra on more accurate surveys, to ensure that it can’t be anyone’s fault. The repairs themselves will cost much the same, however.
Wasn’t a full survey rejected on cost grounds?
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The whole thing should have been clad and filled. Would have saved millions. However a “UK Consultant” told us that wave action in SPP might lose sand from Cow Bay or something like that.
Consultant makes millions, engineering makes millions, lawyers make millions politicians take no responsibility, civil servants still in place, probbaly all been promoted to fatten up their big old pension plans tax payers get screwed again
Sound familiar?
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Sandboy it didn’t need a “UK Consultant” to advise against the stupidity of cladding and filling in the New Jetty because there’s plenty of people working in and around the harbour who would tell you that.
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