A52 shambles: ‘This can’t happen again’
SCHEME RAN MASSIVELY OVER BUDGET AND TOOK A YEAR AND A HALF LONGER TO COMPLETE
DERBY City Council has catalogued the failures and errors of the costly A52 project as it nears total site completion – and has committed not to repeat its mistakes.
The project, aimed at improving travel, cutting congestion through the city and supporting huge plans creating hundreds of new jobs, nearly trebled in cost and took a year and a half longer than planned to complete.
Its final cost is £43.2 million, including £2.9 million which was set aside for unexpected costs, up from an initial total of £14.9 million.
Construction started in October 2017 and ended in October last year, 18 months overdue.
Auditors had slammed the project as “poorly conceived and costed” with the “over-optimistic” initial cost “based on assumptions and guesswork”.
Final site operations will come to a close and its substantial workforce will finally be stepped down by the end of February, officially bringing an end to the troubled project.
The success of the scheme will be properly put to the test once traffic levels are back to normal after lockdown.
The Wyvern Way exit on to Pride
Park has been “considerably widened” from two to four lanes.
The 57-acre Derby Triangle site, just off the A52, set to spark more than 1,300 jobs, is now free to move forward at full pace. It has been dubbed Pride Park II.
A new footbridge over the A52 was also craned into place in late October. The roundabouts at Derwent Parade and Stanier Way have been improved, too.
Lincoln Smithers, principal design engineer at Derby City Council, told a meeting of the authority’s housing and regeneration committee on January 18: “It has been a challenging project and we won’t try and cover up the fact that from where the project started from in terms of its budget and programme, things have been significantly delayed and because of that there is an interest to understand what were the issues that made that happen.”
Major concerns were identified in January 2019. In June of the same year 53 recommendations were made about how the project and council could improve.
A presentation displayed by Mr Smithers during the meeting showed that “cost reporting and risk management were not effective” along with the escalation of issues to senior officers with “ineffective” monitoring of progress on the scheme. There was also an “over reliance on a single council officer for the delivery” and “inadequate” checks and balances on the design development – which had still not been finalised when the scheme was already under way, Mr Smithers said.
He said there was “an optimism that design solutions could be established as they arose” which did not prove to be the case, and was found to cause major budgeting issues.
Mr Smithers said that an “inadequate” financial risk allowance was allocated to the project – extra funding to prop up unexpected costs. He also said there was a “pressure to bid for external grant funding in a timescale that meant financial risks associated with the project were not fully understood”. Further “significant areas of learning” were that the maturity (readiness/fullness) of the design was not sufficient at the point it was awarded.
When the project was put out to tender and awarded to Galliford Try in December 2016, only 60 per cent of the final designs had been completed, with schemes typically at 95 per cent at this stage. Mr Smithers said that early changes to the design did not consider wider impacts and that early involvement of Galliford Try was “not effective” with team relationships “strained” due to the challenges of delivery.
There were significant changes to this project which meant “we kept chasing the cost”.
He said close working with contractors could have seen more efficiency and improved decisionmaking and could have bypassed some of the eventual overruns on budget and completion.
Following the 53 recommendations made to the project, the council has made sweeping improvements, it says, with much more elected member involvement and a de-tangling of management of the project.
Contractors are now actively challenged to find ways to speed up the project, a process which will be repeated for future schemes.
The city council’s project manager, Phillip Massey, said the scheme entailed 57,000 sq metres of new carriageway, 28 controlled crossings, 4,000 sq metres of cycleways, 1,200 metres of concrete barriers, drainage and flood prevention.
Mr Massey said: “It has really unlocked the potential of that land between Wyvern Way and the river.”
Cllr Sarah Russell told the meeting: “I am reassured that we will be completing the project within the revised timescale and budget, I am very pleased about that.
“We have to be assured that the council has understood fully what went wrong with the project and make sure we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. We cannot have a situation like this again.”
We have to be assured the council has understood fully what went wrong and make sure we don’t repeat the mistakes. Sarah Russell