Crossrail Update
Readers of Modern Railways will know that when a major rail project runs into trouble, custom dictates that an external review should be commissioned. Such reviews generally have two aims: to work out exactly what went wrong once it has become too late to fix it, and to show that the organisations that failed so spectacularly to identify an impending crisis can act decisively by agreeing to spend some of our cash on the consultants that will produce the review.
And so it is with Crossrail. Last year joint sponsors Transport for London and the Department for Transport called in KPMG to conduct a governance review of Crossrail Ltd and a separate financial/commercial review after it emerged that the Elizabeth Line would be nowhere near ready to open as planned on 9 December 2018 and the cost of completing the project could rise by billions.
The executive summaries of the KPMG reports have now been made public – mostly. The financial/ commercial one is redacted to hide details of some of the most problematic tier one contracts, as well as internal discussions about when the Elizabeth Line might actually open.
The general picture in the report will be familiar to anyone following this saga:…
