Thames Garden Bridge

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deighton]

The general answer to that question has to be along the same lines. Just as this project still needs to pass the business case to be allocated the £30 million that is pencilled in, similarly we will do our work on other projects in a sensible way and respond to priority needs as they occur. I should just point out that the reason that the Treasury is putting in £30 million is that it is the sensible way to kick-start a fundraising effort. It is much easier to fundraise when people can see that the Government are behind a project and that it the first part of the funding has already been raised.

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that Bernard Shaw was right when he said, nearly a century ago, that on the whole the British never want anything? They particularly did not want, for example, the National Theatre. They got it and are now very proud of it. The same thing is true of the London Eye. Does he not agree that the same thing, in time, may be true of the Garden Bridge?

[Lord Deighton]

I sympathise with that very insightful point. As someone who has worked on both the Olympics and HS2, I suspect that the Garden Bridge may get a welcome rather sooner than either of those projects did.