London’s Garden Bridge cost taxpayers £43m despite being scrapped
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British taxpayers spent £43m on the Garden Bridge, according to the final bill, even though it was not built.
More than 18 months after plans for the bridge were scrapped in August 2017, Transport for London released figures on Wednesday breaking down the expenditure on the project, which was strongly supported by Boris Johnson as mayor of London but decried as a “folly” by its opponents.
In total, almost £54m was spent on preparations for the bridge, which would have spanned the river Thames between Temple and the South Bank. This comprised £11m raised from the private sector, £24m from Transport for London and £18.9m from the Department for Transport.
The tally included £2.16m on consultancy fees, £2.3m on legal costs and another £1.8m on executive pay.
The £11m raised from the private sector also came at a price, with £148,000 spent on computer-generated images of the bridge ‘as a way to persuade donors to come on board’ and a further £418,000 on a gala event held in Battersea to find potential donors. The website promoting the bridge cost more than £160,000.
The architect Thomas Heatherwick and his studio were paid a total of £2.7m, including VAT, for bridge design work, while approximately £1.3m was spent on marine surveys, including a “careful search” for unexploded bombs in the river.
Arup, the engineering group, received £12.7m in fees, while Bouygues Travaux Publics and Cimolai SpA, which were contracted as a joint venture to build the bridge, were paid £21.4m. Of that, £2.1m was attributed to the “costs suffered by the joint venture and charged to the Garden Bridge Trust [the charity behind the bridge] for the demobilisation of staff, offices and repatriation of plant and labour” once the project had been cancelled.
The Garden Bridge was finally abandoned in August 2017 because of a shortfall in private funds, issues with securing rights to land and problems obtaining final planning consent, despite three years of talks with the relevant parties.
Alex Williams, director of city planning at TfL, said the organisation had worked to ensure that the “cost to the public sector has been kept to a minimum”. He added: “We have now confirmed the final payment legally required under the terms of the underwriting agreement made by the government. This formally ends our involvement with the project.”
Caroline Pidgeon, chair of the London Assembly’s transport committee, called for a Charity Commission investigation into the trust, which she accused of “squandering public money”.
“The details of wasted money spent on the Garden Bridge project [are] the final confirmation of the utter folly of the project,” she said.
The £43m is short of the £60m of public funding actually made available to the trust in June 2015, comprising £30m each from TfL and the transport department.
TfL will now pay a final £5.5m to the trust as part of the scheme’s cancellation agreement, which the transport body said was 40 per cent lower than what it could have been.
The payout will also help to refund private donors who claimed the trust had promised to give them back their money if the plan failed. Of the 27 donors, the financial information group Bloomberg is in line for the largest repayment and will receive £2.27m of its £3.2m grant.
One couple will be refunded £3,200 for “repayment of auction bid ‘table tennis with Boris’.” The documents state: “Prize not delivered, contractual obligation to repay.”
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