Half TfL’s bridge spend wasted on failed garden project
IT has been revealed that TfL’s £24 million spend on the failed Garden Bridge equalled more than half of all the money it spent on the capitals’ bridges over the last decade.
Some £43 million of public money was spent on the Garden Bridge, the pet project of former London Mayor turned Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
It would have linked the South Bank with Temple Tube Station, and have been lined with dozens of trees. The project was killed off in 2017, before any building work had taken place, when Sadiq Khan withdrew funding.
But £24 million of that funding came from TfL while the rest was spent by the Department for Transport.
By comparison, TfL spent just under £43 million on the upkeep of all of London’s river crossings up to 2020/21.
A further £13 million was spent on proposals for a bridge between Rotherhithe and Canary Wharf, before it was axed in 2019.
The last 12 months have seen widely reported criticism of how
London’s bridges have required expensive maintenance work, most notably Hammersmith Bridge.
The bridge, which closed to vehicles 23 months ago, currently requires stabilisation works estimated at £40 million before it can carry pedestrians. A full repair job of its cracked pedestals has been quoted at £140 million.
The £43 million spend was revealed in a letter from TfL commissioner Andy Byford to London assembly member Murad
Qureshi (Labour).
Glynn Barton, TfL’s director of network management, said: “All bridges maintained by TfL are safe and we continue to invest in them regularly to ensure that they can remain open to all road users. This includes regular structural inspections and carrying out day-to-day and large-scale maintenance whenever necessary to ensure they continue to be in good working order.”
Downing Street has been approached for comment on the
PM’s support for the Garden Bridge.
The ill-fated project was effectively scrapped by Sadiq Khan who withdrew funding after he took office as Mayor.
A review showed that its eventual price tag – dependent on private funding – would have been £200 million.
Many of London’s bridges are not owned by TfL, although it heavily subsidises their maintenance.
According to Mr Byford’s letter, between 2010/11 and 2020/21
TfL spent £24 million on five bridges that are owned by local authorities: Chelsea, Albert, Putney, Wandsworth and Putney.
Over those 10 years, TfL spent £3.4 million on bridges owned by the Bridge House Estates: Tower Bridge, London Bridge, Southwark, the Millennium Bridge and Blackfriars.
And it spent £15.4 million on the bridges it solely owns: Battersea, Chiswick, Kew, Lambeth, Twickenham, Vauxhall and Westminster.
Mr Byford’s letter also reveals how it will spend “estimates totalling £135 million-£215 million for the next 10 years”.
Although its finances were an issue before the pandemic hit, TfL’s finances collapsed into crisis over the last 12 months while its fare revenue dropped by more than 90 per cent.
It received Government bailouts of £1.6 billion in May and £1.8 billion in November.
TfL chiefs and civil servants are thrashing out the terms of its next deal, to be announced by April, the new financial year.