End still not in sight for Scottish Parliament team

The project team on the disaster-prone £430m Scottish Parliament project have still yet to complete the final account for the scheme, nearly a year after the project was formally opened.

A Scottish Parliament statement to QS News released on Wednesday confirmed the delay. The project team, which includes QS Davis Langdon, had originally hoped to achieve this in spring 2005.

The statement said: “The settlement of trade packages is scheduled to continue until the end of the year. Our construction manager Bovis Lend Lease is responsible for the settling of all financial accounts and will continue to keep us updated on progress.”

Packages such as the fit-out of the building and the services will be among the last to be agreed. This is due to changes made to these packages as late as this summer during the parliamentary recess. A source said: “There have been some electrical lighting changes as well as some more security cameras installed.”

Sources close to the team also said the tortuous process of checking every detail on all the packages might have in fact led to the scheme coming in below the £431m budget. A source said: “That figure may not be reached. It could be as much as £10m below that.”

The parliament’s statement however said the overall cost to date for Holyrood “remains unchanged at £430.5m. It is expected that the final cost will be reported to the Parliament’s Finance Committee in 2006.”

The team has sat down with trade contractors and checked their records of component costs with the actual receipts
Source close to the project

The source close to the team added that the painstaking checks of the packages, down to the cost of individual components, had led to the costs actually falling. It could also lead to an absence of legal claims from trade contractors. The source said: “It’s not been like a commercial situation where a client makes an offer to the contractors and a compromise is struck. This client wants a full audit trail, which takes longer.

“The team has been grinding out figures. They have sat down with trade contractors and checked their records of component costs with the actual receipts.”

One source expressed frustration at the process. He said: “It’s all been done in very difficult circumstances. The team has had had to backtrack over 18,000 changes made during construction and dot all the Is and cross the Ts. There have also been delays of weeks and months to get responses from the client on issues. It’s extremely frustrating.”

The Scottish Parliament building was officially opened by the Queen last October. An inquiry into the running of the project held by Lord Fraser last year found that a lack of communication between civil servants and ministers was the main cause of the scheme running late and going ten times over its original budget. Both Bovis Lend Lease and Davis Langdon said they would change the way they approached schemes in future in the wake of the scheme.