Wanted: strong client

A whole host of addendums and appendixes to the latest project documents. And the scheme up in smoke. Yes, we finally reached some conclusion to the saga of the Paddington Health Campus (PHC) PFI hospital, surely a candidate for most cock-up ridden construction project of recent times. The area’s strategic health authority has finally swallowed its pride, seen the writing on the wall and binned the project this week (see news).

Where to start with this fiasco? Well it appears that the project will be subject to an unprecedented eighth review, following the failure to find a viable solution to combining three hospitals and a research facility into one complicated city centre site. But this time, crucially, it will be an independent one, not one undertaken by one of the many interested parties.

And one surely can guess the main conclusions.

Paddington is an abject lesson in an out of control client. Combining two NHS trusts, Imperial College, a strategic health authority, oh and the Department of Health for good measure, and you have a recipe for disaster. The lack of control became clear following a damning review into the running of the scheme carried out by the Treasury, Department of Health and National Audit Office, and then the emergence of the barmy idea that the PHC team could strike a quick and easy land deal, with a private sector land owner, to secure the site it needed for the project. As leading developer William McKee pointed out last week, a client needs to be strong and “resist the temptation to tamper with the project”. If only this were the case at Paddington. The problem now is how each of the parties that so desperately need new services will be able to bounce back from such a setback.