Big Ben

[ditchman]

the original quote was £29 million quid to do the Elizabeth Tower 

 

actual cost £80 million

 

in my past job if i had quoted that badly i would have been sacked 50 times over

 

infact it reminds me of the costings of building that awful structure they call the Scottish parliament.......

how on earth do they get away with it............and everyone will be getting MBE's and Knighthoods

[TIGHTCHOKE]

Because once they get their quote accepted somewhere in the small print will allow for massive increases and there is no way to stop them.

"Big Ben" is a national Icon, you try stopping the work once the scaffolding was up.

[Jim Neal]

It does bug me a bit how the clock is wrongly referred to as "Big Ben", which is in fact the nickname of the largest of the bells within the tower.

But I suppose the whole thing has never really had a catchy name for people to call it.  "The four-faced striking clock in a tower at the north end of Westminster Palace" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue does it 😂

[enfieldspares]

1 hour ago, TIGHTCHOKE said:

Because once they get their quote accepted somewhere in the small print will allow for massive increases and there is no way to stop them.

"Big Ben" is a national Icon, you try stopping the work once the scaffolding was up.

You should look at HS2, the two Queen Elizabeth class carriers, and etc., etc.. But it is indeed scandalous.

[Nuke]

6 minutes ago, enfieldspares said:

You should look at HS2, the two Queen Elizabeth class carriers, and etc., etc.. But it is indeed scandalous.

Procuremant is hard work and it takes a lot of experience. When you do one offs it gets even harder since you have nothing to benchmark against.

On the other hand it would probably cost the same or even more if it was a government run company doing it.

/M

[Yellow Bear]

5 minutes ago, Nuke said:

On the other hand it would probably cost the same or even more if it was a government run company doing it.

The price would be double (at least) what it is and it would have taken at least 3 times as long.  That is if it ever got completed.

[mel b3]

2 hours ago, ditchman said:

the original quote was £29 million quid to do the Elizabeth Tower 

 

actual cost £80 million

 

in my past job if i had quoted that badly i would have been sacked 50 times over

 

infact it reminds me of the costings of building that awful structure they call the Scottish parliament.......

how on earth do they get away with it............and everyone will be getting MBE's and Knighthoods

dont be so picky , they were only £51,000,000 out , it could easily happen to any of us . its not as if the country cant easily afford it  , and in the grand scheme of money wasting government  ventures , 51 mil is peanuts.

can you just imagine going to your boss , and trying to explain that you'd made a 51 million quid mistake , he'd rip your insides out .

 

[TRINITY]

3 hours ago, ditchman said:

 

actual cost £80 milli

 

In all fairness that's not bad value, you would be pushed to buy a premiership footballer for that

[bluesj]

All these jobs go to the lowest bidder, you have to put in an unrealistically low bid or you don't get any work!

It bugs me because its a waste of my money, one of the main roads near me was "resurfaced" a couple of months back it is now much worse that it was before the work was done!

[ditchman]

5 minutes ago, TRINITY said:

In all fairness that's not bad value, you would be pushed to buy a premiership footballer for that

good god.................that is a real reality check...

[discobob]

I opened this topic in trepidation - wondering if it was going to be about a star of adult movies!!!

[Walker570]

30 minutes ago, TRINITY said:

In all fairness that's not bad value, you would be pushed to buy a premiership footballer for that

That's very true .      Big Ben and the Westminster Square must bring in zillions from foriegn tourism...ok covid stumped that for a while but common sense will prevail eventually.

[Nuke]

35 minutes ago, bluesj said:

All these jobs go to the lowest bidder, you have to put in an unrealistically low bid or you don't get any work!

If you can't separate companies based on value, since value is very different for different people, only price remains.

It's kind of sad really.

/M

[oowee]

The appraisal for this stuff will have been done in endless detail. It's likely that the quote accepted would have been best value rather than lowest price. The work would have had contingency sums and unquoted items that would have to be negotiated for unknowns. Exactly the same as when we have significant work done at home. My house rebuild quote was half the final cost as during the process I added additional items and many elements (fit and finish) were not quoted for originaly.

[TRINITY]

1 hour ago, discobob said:

I opened this topic in trepidation - wondering if it was going to be about a star of adult movies!!!

I opened it thinking it was about a well known clay coach

[JohnfromUK]

43 minutes ago, oowee said:

My house rebuild quote was half the final cost as during the process I added additional items and many elements (fit and finish) were not quoted for originaly.

And this is the key issue;   The quote was NOT a quote for the work carried out.

I don't know what the £21M was for - and what additional work and changes to the original work package were to add £59M, but they must have been considerable.

With your own home (and mine was very similar in changes to spec and consequent costs) it is entirely your choice as to how much variation in work and change in price you are prepared to accept.  However, it is not a satisfactory way of spending either public funds or someone else's money.

Edited September 6, 2021 by JohnfromUK

[Newbie to this]

Just shows how inept/corrupt (more than likely both) our civil service is.

[London Best]

2 hours ago, TRINITY said:

In all fairness that's not bad value, you would be pushed to buy a premiership footballer for that

You would be lucky to buy one that could tell the time though!

[oowee]

7 minutes ago, Newbie to this said:

Just shows how inept/corrupt (more than likely both) our civil service is.

Why? How could they possibly know the extent of the job in detail without spending millions on analysis? How would they tender the analysis. Anyone who has overseen a large scale project of this type will know exactly why the costs escalate. 

[Bigbob]

Surely there must be somebody that puts these contracts out to tender to include a sentence that says If the work is not completed on time and in budget the contractor is liable to be sued for the rest of cost etc 

[TRINITY]

If over spending like this gets you totally miffed, dont even consider looking into HS2

[Jaymo]

They repainted the St George’s in their red which has pee’d a few Scots off- that’s got to be worth the extra millions for a start? 
 

[Jim Neal]

The thing about publicly spent money is that we all look at it from a perspective relative to our own wallets and bank accounts.  We scale it versus the value of our house, what we earn in a year, etc etc.... but really it's absolutely irrelevant to look at it like that.

If you look at it from the other end, £80M is loose change lost down the back of the sofa.  The UK's GDP in the last "normal" financial year we've had (2019) was just short of three trillion pounds.

I might have got the decimal point in the wrong place, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but £80M is 0.00026% of the UK's 2019 GDP.

To put that in perspective, if you earned £30k a year and you treated yourself to fish & chips on your way home from work, you've spent roughly the equivalent that the UK have done on the clock tower.

This is yet another example of tabloid newspaper fodder, designed to pull peoples' puppet strings.  And it works every time!

[Nuke]

8 hours ago, Bigbob said:

Surely there must be somebody that puts these contracts out to tender to include a sentence that says If the work is not completed on time and in budget the contractor is liable to be sued for the rest of cost etc 

No company would agree to that. 10% liability or similar maybe.

/M

[redial]

Should have sold it to the yanks and put the cash towards 

Social Care.

 

Edited September 7, 2021 by redial
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