Garden Bridge: Funding

Debate between Sandy Martin and Rupa Huq

Friday 15th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

It has been a busy week for us all at work, with the intractable impasse of Brexit preoccupying most, but life goes on outside this unsolvable Rubik’s cube. I want to draw attention to a scandalous misconduct issue: the £50 million-plus spent on a flower-strewn bridge across the Thames on which zero construction ever occurred. At least £30 million of that comes from the coffers of the Department for Transport. I am pleased to have a Transport Minister before us today, but this ill-fated project is a huge, multidimensional issue that is cross-departmental in nature. I hope that he can share some insights into how this represents best value and best practice and how we can learn lessons so that we do not have a repetition of what has been a catalogue of errors.

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend speaks about not having a repetition, but while this is possibly the largest example of public money being wasted on something that was never going to go ahead, public money has been wasted on other infrastructure projects, well after the time that it was obvious to anyone that they would not go ahead. Does she share my hope that we can stop this waste of public money in future?

[Dr Huq]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who, until his elevation to the Front Bench, was a fellow member of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, where we address these things all the time. He is bang on the money, as ever, and I will come to some of those points.

Certain words are associated with certain terms: Profumo—“scandal”; Suez—“crisis”; Grenfell—“tragedy”; Dunblane—“massacre”; and Clapham Common—“rail disaster”. That one was for the Rail Minister. The word “fiasco” should, I think, for ever more be associated with Garden Bridge. The Observer claimed last month that the project was scandalously mismanaged and would cost the taxpayer £43 million for nothing.

This is the biggest uninvestigated scandal by a long chalk. It is two to three times the size of the Kids Company scandal, which our Committee did investigate, and which was turned into a London theatrical musical. It is unlike Kids Company, however, in that there is nothing to show for it, and it is unlike Profumo and those other scandals in that it is a genuine scandal of which many people have never heard. We will never see anything about it in certain outlets. The now departed from here Chancellor George Osborne’s fingerprints are all over it, and it has been rendered invisible in the Evening Standard recently, since it all went wrong. I think the paper was quite cheerleading about it before, under its former editor. That editor is now editor of the “Today” programme, so we will never hear about it on the radio first thing in the morning over our cornflakes either.

Many of the so-called great and good are implicated in this whole affair. The right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) is among them. The national treasure Joanna Lumley, who had some success with the Ghurka issue, had less success in this instance. The project had been brewing since at least 2003. The Labour Mayor at the time, Ken Livingstone, flatly refused to do anything about it. His successor, the ex-Tooting MP and current post-holder Sadiq Khan, commissioned the report undertaken by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), which eviscerated the affair. After the evidence appeared, the plug was pulled. The indomitable Will Hurst of Architects’ Journal pondered:

“How was the Garden Bridge Trust able to spend £46m on a non-existent bridge?”

In fact, the figures after the final winding-up costs exceed that.

A brand-new report published by Dan Anderson of Fourth Street, a consultancy specialising in heritage lottery funding, has called the project an extraordinary waste of public money—more than £53 million in total, over 80% of which came from the public purse. The London Assembly member Tom Copley demanded to know exactly why the additional funds were not vetoed by officials when it was so obvious that the project was flailing, a point made a moment ago by my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Sandy Martin). As I said earlier, there was £30 million from the Department for Transport. Our northern colleagues—indeed, anyone outside the M25—expressed indignation about the fact that so much was spent on the bridge when, in a climate of austerity, transport upgrades and initiatives have not gone ahead. This is not just a London issue; it is wider than that.

In terms of cost, the garden bridge dwarfs previous scandals. I have already mentioned Kids Company. The cash for honours scandal resulted in an £18 million loss. Arms to Iraq cost £4 million, and the parliamentary expenses scandal £2.5 million. Only the Northern Ireland renewable heat initiative cost more. However, there has been an astonishing lack of repercussions in this case.

The Minister may have a sense of déjà vu. In 2016, he was in a similar slot, responding to a debate on this matter initiated by my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey). However, a lot has changed since then. We have now seen the final bill. On 13 February, just over a month ago, the cost to the taxpayer was revealed to be £53.3 million. A further £5.5 million of winding-up costs was to be paid by the Department for Transport, via Transport for London. In 2018, the legal opinion of Jason Coppel QC, an expert in public and procurement law, referred to a “probable” violation of obligations by trustees, including Joanna Lumley and Paul Morrell, the former chief construction adviser to the Government. There is a sniff of “mates’ rates” here. The project should not have been given the green light by the Government despite all the warnings.

This is a sorry end to a supposedly pioneering project, and a far cry from the 2013 national infrastructure plan. At the time, Danny Alexander said that a £30 million fund to kick-start the project would be supplemented by private income. The Minister himself said that the bridge would be magnificent and that people would come from all over the world to see it. I think that it was supposed to be the second biggest tourist attraction in Europe. My parliamentary neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound), was also a big fan, and the computer-generated image excited many people.

Today’s debate is particularly urgent, because the Garden Bridge Trust—the charity responsible for the project—will wind itself up imminently. We now have an itemised bill, in which £21.4 million for building contractors is the biggest expense. Again, this was in 2016, when the funding was not in place and the planning permissions were not there; none of that had been sorted, yet this huge contract was signed off—£10 million to designers and architects, £400,000 on a gala fundraiser, £1.3 million on geotechnical marine surveys of the Thames, £161,000 for the website. So there are huge question marks around the robustness of the business case for this ill-fated bridge to nowhere, and there are questions about the Department for Transport’s own criteria set by the Treasury, which we need to make sure are followed through properly next time. A lot of questions about due process, openness, transparency and accountability have dogged the project since inception and those involved need to be held to account.

We know that the Transport Minister, the Chancellor and Chief Secretary at the time have all moved on, but the Mayor of London from then, the project’s chief midwife, is still active in politics. Until recently, he was Foreign Secretary, and just this week he had a tasteless outburst on the airwaves about money being blown on a historical child abuse inquiry, which has upset families. That seems rich given the cumulative price tag of all his pet projects—not just the unbuilt bridge, but the unused water cannon, the unfeasibly hot buses, the £20,000 on going to Afghanistan to avoid the Heathrow vote.

This episode also raises questions about the role and performance of the Charity Commission. There are question marks over Transport for London as well. It has experienced unprecedented cuts to operational funding over the last five years, with its budget reducing by £700 million a year. It has become one of the few transport authorities in the world that do not receive a direct Government grant for their operational running costs. I would like the Minister to address that.

This is a national scandal. It seems that the usual channels of civil servants and the traffic lights system, by which are warnings when things are going wrong, were bypassed here. It feels like this was a vanity project masquerading as a transport scheme. The fact that it was part of a national infrastructure plan makes it sound more like a regeneration scheme than anything to do with transport. The Hodge report suggests that the sequencing of all the decisions was in tune with electoral cycles rather than anything else. This waste of money on something only tangentially to do with traffic should be seen against the background of austerity, too.

There are implications for other big concerns and projects such as Carillion and HS2, which goes through my seat. There are question marks over the Thomas Heatherwick partnership, which is perceived as greatly favoured in a lot of these contracts nowadays. I am thinking of the Olympic stadium and the new Routemaster buses—the “cauldron on wheels” buses as they have been called. We need to look at the public sector’s use of poorly regulated charities to deliver capital projects, because there is real lack of accountability.

So since the last debate in 2016 there has been a huge volume of new evidence. I would like to know from the Minister whether we can have a fresh inquiry with fresh eyes now that the final bill has come in. There seems to be a merry-go-round involving Arup and others, with people who are trustees also regulating the companies involved and the same companies being awarded contracts.

This floral tribute and unbuilt bridge was meant to pay for itself. Fantastic promises were made, but the local group Thames Central Open Spaces, which I have met, was ringing alarm bells from back in 2014, and it had some success in getting the land listed as an asset of community value.

I ask the Transport Minister why the business case was never really made. Some £60 million of public money was agreed. This is something that I will not lay at the door of his boss whose name rhymes with “failing”, because fortunately that particular Secretary of State did have the foresight to pull the plug on some of this money, but there is a feeling that favoured providers were being fattened up. There seems to be a circular route whereby if we want to, we can set up a charitable arm’s length trust with its opaque governance structures and give all the jobs to our mates and so forth. The regulation is very shady; there is no clear accountability structure here. TfL says it is the Government, and the National Audit Office can only narrowly investigate bits of the Department for Transport and cannot investigate TfL. The GLA has no teeth to investigate TfL. The Public Accounts Committee is now saying that it has done its bit and that this is one for the London Assembly. We are all being led a merry dance, or perhaps led up the garden path. This is a masterclass in buck-passing.

We should be aware that other big projects are going to be funded through this same structure, including the Crystal Palace park and, I think, the national holocaust memorial. Those are great, laudable projects, but we need to ensure that accountability procedures are in place. I mentioned HS2. The garden bridge did not even have the advantage of shaving time off the journey to Birmingham. People saw it as having no direction or purpose.

Was this a complex web of corruption, lies, deception and cover-up, or was it a comedy of errors involving negligence mixed with a touch of arrogance and hubris stemming from a fragmentation of confused responsibilities? Whether this was a cock-up or a conspiracy, lessons must be learned in relation to oversight, because a £40 million-plus mistake is a big mistake to make. This should not be taken lightly. Will Hurst from the Architects’ Journal has said that

“heads should roll over the Garden Bridge but the odds are they won’t”.

There are wider questions about TfL. As I have said, its resource grant has been massively cut. There are also issues about the mishandling of Crossrail, which is now running over budget and over time. It will come through my seat, and my constituents want to know whether it is ever going to happen.

Throughout the garden bridge project, there were constant shortfalls between stated income and real balances. The unforgivable thing was the £24.1 million construction project that was committed to before ownership of the land, funds or permissions were in place. This all happened the wrong way round. Cart before horse; the sequencing was all completely wrong.

I have a couple of questions for the Minister. The National Audit Office report made a series of recommendations about the Department for Transport’s decision-making processes. Have any consequences flowed from that report? Why were DFT officials ignored when they said that there was too much funding for pre-construction activities? We need to see a chain of command between DFT and TfL, because it is not clear what was going on in terms of oversight responsibilities.

We live in an age of freedom of information, social media, public inquiries, televised hearings and investigative journalism, so these kinds of rigged procurement processes involving dodgy competitive tendering and taking things off the books will be noticed now. It is not good enough to have cabals, cliques and the old pals act. I am grateful to Tom Copley, Will Hurst, Peter Walker, Thames Central Open Spaces and Dan Anderson for helping me to illuminate this murky garden bridge fiasco. I have learned a new term this week—“spaffed up the wall”. I learned it from our former Foreign Secretary. Politicians are usually seen as being in it for themselves, incompetent or out of touch, but here it looks as though all three were applicable. I look forward to the Minister’s response, and I hope that we can ensure that these things never happen again.