Shipping Containers Coming To Fargate

[Resident]

2 hours ago, Planner1 said:

No, it’s a specific response to a poster who reckoned that if a central government project had overspent by a similar amount of money there would be folk on here demanding that heads should roll.

 

That was the point of citing government projects that overspend by much higher figures. 

But you cited project that aren't comparable in scale. Changing the transport infrastructure of a major city/whole country cannot be compared to placing a few containers in a city centre. 

The two you cited were only so because they were ones where you could find big figures to try and confuse people into believing that losing £600k wasn't that bad. 

Go again read my kitchen example and answer it. 

Furthermore this project was based on identical projects in other cities, projects that have been successful (in terms of opening on time, providing what was promised etc with little or no overspend). 

SCC failed spectacularly and caused the costs to exceed it's budget by 100%, a cost the taxpayer has to bare. When you have a council that claims the coffers are empty yet £600,000 is wasted because of incompetance it's a hard pill for the public to swallow. 

[Planner1]

5 hours ago, sheffbag said:

i disagree

the costs increased by 150K form the original allocation. This funding came from the Get Building grant which was a fixed pot of money. In order to approve this increase of budget that meant 150K was taken away from projects which would have been scoped out in the bid application. So while you say "no one has lost 600K" a project that may have actually worked was denied the funding it was originally promised due to no one at SCC saying "is this still a good idea" when it came to the committee approving the budget increase.

 

You say it didnt delvier the expected benefits. Unless the bid is in the public spectrum detailing the expected outcomes of the scheme then how do we know what hte expected benefits were?

 

As you are someone who evidently has experience of projects and their management Planner you know as well as i do that a lessons learned report will be written, filed and never seen or utilised again.

For me the key questions are

 

Who approved the decision to purchase the containers instead of leasing for the temporary length of the project? What cost efficiency was there for purchasing?

What was the original plan to dispose of the containers after the project?

During the scoping of the bid did no one put in the risk analysis that you would get no traders so no income to help cover costs?

During the scoping of the bid did no one put in the risk analysis that there may be underground works that would affect the site and what mitigation would be put in place?

When the bid was approved but then a 50% increase in costs was put forward for approval who authorised the budget increase and what reviews were put in place to substantiate the increase in budget as still being cost effective?

 

Sometimes you just have to abandon a project before it goes live and allow the claw back to take place to reuse the money for other projects. I'm sure that the scheme that was denied the 150K additional money the council approved from the grant would have liked to have spent it on their project. I've worked on projects before where the budget was £45M and even though a lot of the people could see issues and raised them it got to nearly tender approval before it was decided to run a much smaller pilot first to check feasability. Whilst they couldn't run a pilot here i would suggest that the people making the final decisions didn't look at the bigger picture in this instance.

 

 

All good points, yes the overspend on this means there’s less to spend on the wider Fargate project.

 

The recent council report which has been linked by another poster says that they still expect to cover the outputs / targets with the wider projects. There is a clawback clause if they don’t. 
 

Also worth noting that SCC internal audit are looking at the project and I’d expect that they will be asking many of the  questions you pose.

 

Any contracts are signed off by the councils legal and procurement teams, who make sure the right options have been considered ( like leasing v purchasing).

 

I’d think most of the information is available if you have a dig on SCC and the Combined Authority websites ( committee minutes and agendas etc) but you could get it via an FOI request if you wanted.

 

You’re right, sometimes you just have to abandon the project or cut it back. 

[S6_owl1986]

The planning and execution of this project was nowt but embarrassing for the city,  

 

And last few days you see people now whinging that SCC got £0

from the levelling up fund hand out … how on earth is anyone surprised this council got rejected ??    And , before we listen to the claims of it all going down south to ‘Tory’ areas let’s have a look over the motorway and see how the notoriously Tory area Barnsley got on …. Oh yeah they bagged £10.2M  which they’ll probably use wisely if you look at the recent glassworks development and take that as anything to go on 

 

 

[cuttsie]

1 hour ago, S6_owl1986 said:

The planning and execution of this project was nowt but embarrassing for the city,  

 

And last few days you see people now whinging that SCC got £0

from the levelling up fund hand out … how on earth is anyone surprised this council got rejected ??    And , before we listen to the claims of it all going down south to ‘Tory’ areas let’s have a look over the motorway and see how the notoriously Tory area Barnsley got on …. Oh yeah they bagged £10.2M  which they’ll probably use wisely if you look at the recent glassworks development and take that as anything to go on 

 

 

LThe Barnsley town centre is spectacular now all the work is finished in just four years

[HeHasRisen]

Spectacular? Barnsley?

Lets not go nuts, its hardly the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

[hackey lad]

30 minutes ago, HeHasRisen said:

Spectacular? Barnsley?

Lets not go nuts, its hardly the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

That wasn't the posters point .

[S6_owl1986]

Spectacular is quite possibly a bit OTT 

 

But it’s a great development, really busy market and cracking food court I’ve been down a few times on an evening aswell ,  can’t fault the place to be honest , makes you want to visit a town centre,  few nice little bars popping up aswell 

 

Free parking at weekends,  they seem to have got it bang on 

[Resident]

2 hours ago, S6_owl1986 said:

The planning and execution of this project was nowt but embarrassing for the city,  

 

And last few days you see people now whinging that SCC got £0

from the levelling up fund hand out … how on earth is anyone surprised this council got rejected ??    And , before we listen to the claims of it all going down south to ‘Tory’ areas let’s have a look over the motorway and see how the notoriously Tory area Barnsley got on …. Oh yeah they bagged £10.2M  which they’ll probably use wisely if you look at the recent glassworks development and take that as anything to go on 

 

 

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Glassworks hasn't been without it's issues but those were quickly resolved. 

However the rail bridge they planned and approved before network rail pointed out that it was too low for trains to pass underneath & then lost out on the 2.5 million funding because they failed to start the project on time, which is now going to cost the Barnsley taxt payer 5.something million. 

[Resident]

On 19/01/2023 at 18:55, Resident said:

Would you be happy if I quoted you a new kitchen and said it'd be 5000 then, whilst you're still missing a cupboard and fitted your sink 2ft offset from the window, asked for 10,000 saying I won't be completing the rest because I didn't think to check where the drain was and can't fit the cooker because I ordered a gas one and there's no gas supply?  

@Planner1 Still waiting on an answer to this question. You've answered other posts including my own but so far ignored this question. 

[Planner1]

3 hours ago, Resident said:

@Planner1 Still waiting on an answer to this question. You've answered other posts including my own but so far ignored this question. 

I’ve given an answer to the point you’re making, you just don’t like it. It is still the answer whether you like it or not.