As reprehensible as a company as Thames Water is theres really no choice here, the reservoir is badly needed as water demands increase. That need is rising every year as climate change throws out more and more droughts.
innermotion7 on
Let me fix the headline.
We will continue to fleece customers, create more debt and pull more profits than ever before and yes we are providing a great service !
XenorVernix on
Here we go again with another infrastructure project ballooning in costs. Someone is getting rich out of this.
vonscharpling2 on
Once again I am calling for anyone in British politics to get a hold of the issue of why it costs so much to build anything here.
Other countries have massively lower costs and good outcomes & safety records. Why aren’t we copying them wholesale?
_HGCenty on
Infrastructure project in the UK goes overbudget. And in other news, the water in reservoirs are wet.
MoffTanner on
So that’s a cost range of 4-5p per litre stored.
The Anglian project in Lincolnshire is going to be 2p per litre stored and the Saint Soline in France will be 1p per litre stored.
Is it just land cost?
A quick Google says you can buy steel storage tanks for the equivalent of 4p per litre.
ByteSizedGenius on
While it’s fun to poke run at Thames Water, just a reminder that the Environment Agency and the secretary of state at the time repeatedly rejected this in both 2007 and 2011 because there was no “immediate need.”
Snap_Ride_Strum on
£7.5bn to build a puddle. Nice work if you can get it.
South_Buy_3175 on
Because of course it does.
We’ll have about 30 contractors carrying out checks and performing tests that charge 5K an hour and take 6 months to get results.
It’s so fucking blatantly corrupt they don’t try hiding it, simply an update. “Yeah… the costs have doubled again and the expected date of completion is sometime in the next 2 decades”
Utter joke
arabidopsis on
Fenland one is £7bn.
Costs are pointless if you don’t include the return on investment. Articles like this just reinforce the NIMBY mindset
Durzo_Blintt on
If I ran my team like people run building and development projects in the UK, I’d be fired within a month. It’s crazy how it works. There is something fundamentally wrong with the process that needs fixing if costs spiral and delays occur in every single thing we try to build.
evergoodstudios on
Years ago 1 person would be able to dig a hole, put in a post, concrete the post in, fix the ornaments to it, test the post and sign off the post.
Now we need, a whole council to pick the site, 10+ persons to sign off the planned site, a committee to decide the road closures, 20 people to dig the hole, 3 people to put the post in the hole, 17 people to put on the furniture, 20 people to sign off the post. A whole company to remove the road works and closures. Then reopen the road, decide the post was not in the correct place – round and round they go. That is the reason everything costs so much. That’s not even taking into account health and safety and cost increases due to the council and planning take long too long in the first place. UK is an absolute joke for building anything.
Von_Uber on
I love articles like this and the comments that follow.
Fun fact: initial estimates are just that, and when you do further investigations into things like ground conditions, and you fine the intial woefully optimistic assumptions at the concept stage were exactly that, the costs go up.
I’ve been on a project where the inital concept cost was rejected as ‘too expensive’ because the client (the gov) didn’t like the answer they were getting as it made it toe expensive to get funding, so they decided that the project would cost what they wanted it to.
Lo and behold when it gets built it costs around what the original estimate thought it would, yet it gets classed as ‘over budget’.
The issue is people don’t have a clue either what things cost or what exactly goes into the design and cosntructon of things. I bet most think a reservoir is just ‘dump a load of earth to make an embankment, how hard can it be’.
InsaneGorilla0 on
I’m just down the road, probably isn’t helped by the locals being whiny twats about it. God knows how much extra they’ve forced to be spent on reports/lawyers/surveys to justify it getting built.
jungleboy1234 on
since when does building infrastructure in the UK not mean costs increasing tenfold?
We have all these academics that spend their lifetimes working out why this is the case yet we have no solutions. Its like that with a lot of structurally problematic issues in the UK, why?!
FuzzyYellow9046 on
From what I understand this reservoir wouldn’t be needed if they fixed leaking pipes, but building the reservoir is more attractive for the company’s balance sheet, over maintaining infrastructure. Amazing failure of capitalism right there.
ash_ninetyone on
You’d think digging a big hole and filling it with water wouldn’t be that expensive.
Something is wrong with public contracts here. Just form a Ministry of Works to do infrastructure projects in house. Subcontract it only when you actually need more hands.
MetalWorking3915 on
Im gonna speculate that this is over inflated to help thames water financially in some way or another
cjc1983 on
I just think we need to be more innovative with reservoirs, rather than just damming up the countryside…
Build ‘vertical reservoirs’ (essentially a 50m x 500m deep tunnels to store water).
Very little footprint above ground.
Will store 981 million litres of water.
You do all the red tape for the first one then then replicate it multiple times to keep costs down.
OkMeasurement6930 on
Should probably claim that back from the water bosses. They’d still have a cool 100 billion of pure profit.
Random_Guy_47 on
They need to start sticking to the limits they set.
Why are the costs tripling? Surely the company that got the job of building it signed a contract saying they would do it for a specified price. If it ends up costing them more that’s the companies problem, why do they get to jack up the price?
Sszaj on
It’s a lake Michael, what could it cost, 7.5 billion pounds?
ForceStories19 on
To dig a hole… that’s the essence of it right? Digging a hole?
£150m bat sheds aside.. this is just.. digging a hole? And it’s £7.5bn?
For context the Americans built an entire new terminal at Newark airport for less…
23 commenti
As reprehensible as a company as Thames Water is theres really no choice here, the reservoir is badly needed as water demands increase. That need is rising every year as climate change throws out more and more droughts.
Let me fix the headline.
We will continue to fleece customers, create more debt and pull more profits than ever before and yes we are providing a great service !
Here we go again with another infrastructure project ballooning in costs. Someone is getting rich out of this.
Once again I am calling for anyone in British politics to get a hold of the issue of why it costs so much to build anything here.
Other countries have massively lower costs and good outcomes & safety records. Why aren’t we copying them wholesale?
Infrastructure project in the UK goes overbudget. And in other news, the water in reservoirs are wet.
So that’s a cost range of 4-5p per litre stored.
The Anglian project in Lincolnshire is going to be 2p per litre stored and the Saint Soline in France will be 1p per litre stored.
Is it just land cost?
A quick Google says you can buy steel storage tanks for the equivalent of 4p per litre.
While it’s fun to poke run at Thames Water, just a reminder that the Environment Agency and the secretary of state at the time repeatedly rejected this in both 2007 and 2011 because there was no “immediate need.”
£7.5bn to build a puddle. Nice work if you can get it.
Because of course it does.
We’ll have about 30 contractors carrying out checks and performing tests that charge 5K an hour and take 6 months to get results.
It’s so fucking blatantly corrupt they don’t try hiding it, simply an update. “Yeah… the costs have doubled again and the expected date of completion is sometime in the next 2 decades”
Utter joke
Fenland one is £7bn.
Costs are pointless if you don’t include the return on investment. Articles like this just reinforce the NIMBY mindset
If I ran my team like people run building and development projects in the UK, I’d be fired within a month. It’s crazy how it works. There is something fundamentally wrong with the process that needs fixing if costs spiral and delays occur in every single thing we try to build.
Years ago 1 person would be able to dig a hole, put in a post, concrete the post in, fix the ornaments to it, test the post and sign off the post.
Now we need, a whole council to pick the site, 10+ persons to sign off the planned site, a committee to decide the road closures, 20 people to dig the hole, 3 people to put the post in the hole, 17 people to put on the furniture, 20 people to sign off the post. A whole company to remove the road works and closures. Then reopen the road, decide the post was not in the correct place – round and round they go. That is the reason everything costs so much. That’s not even taking into account health and safety and cost increases due to the council and planning take long too long in the first place. UK is an absolute joke for building anything.
I love articles like this and the comments that follow.
Fun fact: initial estimates are just that, and when you do further investigations into things like ground conditions, and you fine the intial woefully optimistic assumptions at the concept stage were exactly that, the costs go up.
I’ve been on a project where the inital concept cost was rejected as ‘too expensive’ because the client (the gov) didn’t like the answer they were getting as it made it toe expensive to get funding, so they decided that the project would cost what they wanted it to.
Lo and behold when it gets built it costs around what the original estimate thought it would, yet it gets classed as ‘over budget’.
The issue is people don’t have a clue either what things cost or what exactly goes into the design and cosntructon of things. I bet most think a reservoir is just ‘dump a load of earth to make an embankment, how hard can it be’.
I’m just down the road, probably isn’t helped by the locals being whiny twats about it. God knows how much extra they’ve forced to be spent on reports/lawyers/surveys to justify it getting built.
since when does building infrastructure in the UK not mean costs increasing tenfold?
We have all these academics that spend their lifetimes working out why this is the case yet we have no solutions. Its like that with a lot of structurally problematic issues in the UK, why?!
From what I understand this reservoir wouldn’t be needed if they fixed leaking pipes, but building the reservoir is more attractive for the company’s balance sheet, over maintaining infrastructure. Amazing failure of capitalism right there.
You’d think digging a big hole and filling it with water wouldn’t be that expensive.
Something is wrong with public contracts here. Just form a Ministry of Works to do infrastructure projects in house. Subcontract it only when you actually need more hands.
Im gonna speculate that this is over inflated to help thames water financially in some way or another
I just think we need to be more innovative with reservoirs, rather than just damming up the countryside…
Build ‘vertical reservoirs’ (essentially a 50m x 500m deep tunnels to store water).
Very little footprint above ground.
Will store 981 million litres of water.
You do all the red tape for the first one then then replicate it multiple times to keep costs down.
Should probably claim that back from the water bosses. They’d still have a cool 100 billion of pure profit.
They need to start sticking to the limits they set.
Why are the costs tripling? Surely the company that got the job of building it signed a contract saying they would do it for a specified price. If it ends up costing them more that’s the companies problem, why do they get to jack up the price?
It’s a lake Michael, what could it cost, 7.5 billion pounds?
To dig a hole… that’s the essence of it right? Digging a hole?
£150m bat sheds aside.. this is just.. digging a hole? And it’s £7.5bn?
For context the Americans built an entire new terminal at Newark airport for less…