Basil Jet wrote:
On 12/07/2019 15:09, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 14:53:19 on
Fri, 12 Jul 2019, Recliner remarked:

Mayor Sadiq Khan strengthened the scrutiny powers of Jacobs to reveal
problems with Crossrail and increase the project’s transparency.

Is he trying to distance himself from the project's failings, despite
being in charge the last three and a bit years?

It's not clear which politician was in charge: responsibility seems to
have been shared between the DfT and TfL. Either way, and perhaps as a
consequence, neither was providing much supervision or oversight. Khan
now seems to be much more in charge and taking an interest, as it's
clear that TfL will have to suffer the consequence of delays and
overspends.

From the Crossrail website:

"About Crossrail Ltd

Crossrail Limited, established in 2001, is the company that has been
set up to build the new railway that will become known as the
Elizabeth line when it opens through central London.

It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Transport for London (TfL)..."

No hiding place for the Mayor!!


I'm no fan of Labour or Khan, but it's by no means obvious that the
blame lies with Khan, or Boris, or elsewhere. If the Mayor is being told
everything's fine, how can they know otherwise?



As I understand it, to avoid constant political interference, Crossrail was
set up with quite a lot of autonomy for the management, so long as the
project was on time and on budget. This gave the management a strong
motivation to report that all was well long after things started to go
wrong.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious that some stations were
obviously late, as was train testing, but I guess everyone was just happy
to get reassuringly good news in the review meetings.