Crossrail £4bn over budget and will not be ready until 2022
CROSSRAIL is set to run £4bn over budget and be completed four years late after the Covid crisis piled further pressure on the embattled transport project.
Bosses now expect the total cost of the new London rail link to come in at £18.7bn – which is £450m more than their previous prediction last November, and almost 25pc above the original £15bn forecast a decade ago.
The rail link, which connects Abbey Wood in the east of the capital with Shenfield in the west, will be called the Elizabeth Line and was originally due to open in 2018.
However, the section from Abbey Wood to Paddington is now not expected to start operating before mid2022. Some parts of the line are operational.
Coronavirus was partly blamed for the latest delay, initially halting work altogether. Social distancing measures now prevent construction from continuing at the normal pace. Staff levels are more than 50pc below normal, with a maximum of 2,000 workers allowed on sites.
The 70-mile programme involves constructing 12 miles of tunnels. This complex underground work and technical difficulties with tracks and signalling systems have proved harder to overcome than initially expected.
Crossrail boss Mark Wild said the project is now in its final stages, but warned of severe uncertainty due to the potential impact of further Covid outbreaks.
Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, said he was “deeply disappointed” by the latest delay and asked Transport for London (TFL) to review the plans to get Crossrail open as quickly as possible.
Tfl’s new commissioner Andy Byford said: “I have been very clear that I am committed to getting this railway open safely and reliably as quickly as possible for the benefit of London and beyond.”
The latest cost spiral will put extra pressure on TFL after revenues have slumped with the pandemic forcing many people to work from home, hammering income from ticket sales.
The idea of tunnelling under the heart of London can be traced back more than half a century.
It came to the fore during the mid2000s after London won the 2012 Olympics and Crossrail finally broke ground on May 15 2009 in Docklands.
What has gone wrong since then remains a subject of much debate.
Many of Crossrail’s problems did not present themselves until late in the day because it emerged that digging under central London was the least difficult part of the project.
“Where it started to come adrift was the fitting out of the stations – the carpentry, the joining, the tiling,” Mark Farmer, an independent engineering consultant, told The Daily Telegraph earlier this year.
Whitechapel station was forecast to cost £110m, but the final bill was £659m. Bond Street was supposed to cost £126m, but could top more than £400m.
The budget for electrics across the whole project was £323m, but could go as high as £1bn.
The National Audit Office concluded in a report: “Changes to the design of construction and systems installation work, and changes to contractors’ delivery schedules cost around £2.5bn between 2013 and 2018.”