Bechtel paid £165m for West Coast line role

Bechtel has been paid £165m for its four year role on the troubled West Coast Main Line upgrade. The firm was brought in by the then Railtrack to take over running of the scheme in May 2002 and at its peak had 140 staff working on the project. The total cost for the project is expected to hit £8.6bn, an overspend of £300m.

A report issued today by the National Audit Office said clients Railtrack and Network Rail spent a total of £615m on programme and project management of the scheme up to April 2006. This was dwarfed by the sum paid to contractors, which totalled £5.2bn for the period.

The report said that while the project and programme management costs were "not out of line" in comparison with other schemes "currently the becnchmarking of programme management costs both within and outside Network Rail remains underdeveloped, with no agreed definitions of project management costs".

The report found that while unit costs for the scheme feel from 2004 they were well above-network wide average renewal costs. They were 60% above average costs in 2003-2004 at over £400 per composited metre, but were reduced to around £340 per metre in 2004-2005 and £275 in 2005-2006.

The report concluded that while the performance of the project was significantly turned round in 2002 lessons needed to be learned from projects such as BAA's Terminal Five scheme.