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Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
Of course. And there'll certainly have been more than one internal memo (or conversation) where a "worst case" (or risk analysis based) figure of ten billion plus would have been floated. But who the hell is going to want to be the one telling the press (during the bidding process, when you're trying to get all enthusiastic) it's going to be that much?
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I'm assuming you're not defending that behaviour, though?
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Also, there's often a reasonably good reason for costs inflating massively. Like Koen says, to build something well costs money.
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Yeah, I don't have a problem with it costing a lot of money to build something well, I just have a problem with being told that it doesn't when it clearly does.
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The intial quotes were probably with a minimal level of transportation investment (say). But then once you're building stuff, someone quite rightly says "Well, while we've got thousands of people here doing things, and planning permission, political momentum, etc we may as well do this other quite worthwhile thing too, right?".
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Shouldn't all this have been done during the planning stage and included in the initial estimate, though? I've never worked on anything like this so I don't know how it all works, but I'm sure some of this stuff could have been better co-ordinated.
I don't live in London so I'm not sure about this, but it's only 2007 so I'm assuming they can't be very far into actually building it yet. To use your analogy, they might not even be at the stage where they've discovered the broken roof yet. I just found
this story from only 3 months ago covering an announcement that the cost had risen to £3.3bn, so I very much doubt that they're dumping all the conceivably possible bad news in this one £9bn announcement; who's to say we won't have several more of these in the years running up to (and possibly after) 2012?
I understand that costs can spiral quite easily from delays and such like, with interest on loans and payment of contractors or whatever, but in this case I wouldn't have thought delays are even an issue, since there's a set time limit.