Department considers abandoning building completely but decides to award more cash Cost goes up to pounds 496m
Department considers abandoning building completely but decides to award more cash Cost goes up to pounds 496m. Project director transferred to other duties.1995: First phase completed.1996: All money on project has been committed, including reserve to cover legal claims. Handover of basement by contractors postponed because of problems with shelving.1992: Problems with cabling revealed, contractors begin to rip it out and start again.1993: Corrosion uncovered in pipes feeding sprinkler system, five expert reports commissioned to solve problem.1994: Specification of sprinkler system completely changed, with new sprinkler heads, new pumps and valves National Heritage select committee examines project. The managers spotted faults that in many such projects would be ignored.
The price carried on spiralling.One group that will benefit greatly from the debacle will be lawyers, who will be kept busy by a string of disputes over contractual claims and counter claims Readers will be marginally better off. The new building will only bump up their number by between 10 and 19 per cent. The capacity of the new science and oriental reading rooms, notes the NAO, will “be exceeded at or shortly after opening” It may be time to start planning a new library. If we start now it might be operational by the year 2020.The British Library:A disaster in the making1982: Building work begins.1988: Ministers set cash limit of pounds 300m for first phase, due to be completed in 1993; contracts awarded to install mechanical bookshelves and electrical cabling.1990: Further pounds 150m is agreed to take library to completion.1991: Faults discovered with shelving system First National Audit Office report. Checks on the quality of the work as it progressed were not good enough. As a result, problems only emerged once the job had been completed and the money had been handed over. By then, it was too late.The recipe for disaster was finished off by the library managers’ desire to construct a building of a standard well above the public norm, and an absence of incentives for getting the job done on time.
This system of “reactive budgeting”, notes the NAO, left the department in a difficult position to challenge their decisions.Fatally, this rarely-followed approach was accompanied by a lack of systematic quality control These were, says the NAO, “inadequate prior to 1991″. Power was delegated by Whitehall to the project director and his superintending officer As problems arose, they waved them through. As the NAO report says: “There was little experience in the UK building industry and even less in central government of the ‘construction management’ approach.”Cost increases were agreed as the project went along. The first problem was that there was little expertise in operating it. This system was adopted, says the NAO, “because of uncertainties about the funding, scope and timetable of the project.” In other words, rather than fixing the price at the outset the Government wanted to agree payments to contractors as it went along, in the hope that this would give it more control and flexibility.The system has turned into a nightmare. When building work started, back in 1982, ministers decided the project should follow a “construction management” costing policy.
For instance, one sub-contractor in his twenties has boasted of having made enough from supplying 250 electricians to be able to retire of the proceeds.Yet the construction companies and workers who have swarmed over the site are merely exploiting a payment system designed by the government. On the four basement floors, the mechanical shelving system, has proved to be a nightmare in itself (see box above).The reasons for this debacle are harder to fathom The library is a large and complex project. The people in charge of designing and building it understandably want a structure that will be of the highest quality: this building should make a statement about the quality of British learning and culture It needs to last. Although its exterior has been widely criticised, its interior is lavish and striking.Yet this desire to build the very best has fallen foul of sometimes gross mismanagement.
A ceiling was ordered to be remade after a quality checker noticed a piece of insulation tape hanging down.The pounds 400,000 corridor linking the book loading bay and the library was replaced because the mortar did not exactly match the design specification. That meant someone had to sort through another 100,000 slates.The fire sprinklers needed revamping when it was found the pipes had corroded and, if a blaze were to have erupted in the basement where most of the books will be stored, they would not have been powerful enough to put it out. About 27,000 slates were ordered for the roof and rejected because the quality control team was not happy with their natural markings. Hand-made bricks that did not quite meet the exacting quality standards received the same treatment. Miles of electrical cables were ripped out because their outer casings were the wrong colour – even though they would eventually be housed in boxes and not be seen.A hundred cabling boxes costing pounds 1,000 each were bought, found to be unnecessary and were eventually tucked away under the floorboards.
