Greenwich town centre streetscape measures cost £119,130 according to Greenwich council
Measures installed in Greenwich town centre for additional pedestrian space cost £119,129,59 according to figures revealed in a Freedom of Information request.
TfL did not agree to fund the bid after Greenwich submitted these details. It took a couple of days and mostly comprised of temporary plastic barriers with sandbags. The sum seems astonishing given the limited nature of work.
Work came in for criticism almost immediately as it forces cyclists to dice with vehicles and blocked access from the one-way system to cycle lanes near the river. Pedestrian crossings are blocked in places:
Many moons after lockdown and this is what faces pedestrians /wheelchairs crossing King William walk to go east from town centre . The ramp does not do anything to help. None cars expected to do a detour – Are you proud of this @Royal_Greenwich @DanLThorpe ? pic.twitter.com/PPvlxakprG
— Kate Middleton (@KateM45) July 26, 2020
Even taking off nearly £50k for six month’s maintenance costs – which presumably is spread across the borough – highlights very high cost for very modest work.
There are a number of other Freedom of Information requests to Greenwich seeking information on what bids were made to TfL for funds and details of what each project contained. This is because the authority neglected to tell the public their plans.
There are also requests to other authorities to gain information on projects and costings, which will be useful to see how they compare to Greenwich. We do have some documents from other authorities which are more transparent than Greenwich. These appear to show projects costing far less:
There are modal filters costed at £9,000 including a cycle contraflow in Bromley town centre. There’s also footway widening using bolt down temporary kerbing rather than plastic barriers and crossing just £17,000.
A new footpath costed at £5,000 is another example. Here’s more examples:
These all point to vastly inflated costs in Greenwich. Could this be why ambition was so low and so little has been achieved?
Southwark closed roads in Peckham and Bermondsey Street for £50,000 each. How did some plastic barriers in Greenwich cost so much?
There’s more documents to go through and follow up posts will be put up shortly.
Update:
Eltham was costed at £142,500:
Both saw little more than plastic barriers.
Well done Murky, this is worthy of some real digging. I suspect that Dan Thorpe is more and more involved in his ”equality’ and other pet projects, which though worthy of course for political correctness does nothing to alleviate/address traffic/pollution/climate change/encouragement of cycling (as the PM is trying to do currently, but not helped by lack of infrastructure in Greenwich). Why was this time WASTED!!!???
First I want to state I’m a big Black Lives Matter supporter but I remember the recent painting in Woolwich with big letters in the middle of the square which to me just seemed very tokenistic and was done “for free” by the councils contractor? Then the same contractor sees large sums for this work at the same time?
The council are happy to let many poorer and areas with large minority groups go to shit, and some painted signs aren’t changing that. All the while much money spent on simple things!!
Gimmicks rather than really helping people seems to be what’s going on.
I’d have done it for £2k plus materials. How hard can it be to put some barriers out, 1m into the road?
The only thing more embarrassing than Greenwich council’s actions is the fact that they keep being reelected and thus vindicated for this rubbish
Isn’t the contractor in Greenwich borough also the same company that sponsor the council’s business awards which gives them a nice slap up three course meal? Champagne lunch over the Thames. Nice.
Worth following the money on this one:
was this subject to tendering rules?
How was value for money assessed?
How are the contractor’s costings apportioned?
What’s the £ spread of contractors for tender and non-tender work in RBG?
Blimey, someone saw RBG coming, didn’t they? Can we all stick our fingers in our ears and go “La, la, la, la” next time some local councillor starts banging on about how much money RBG haven’t received from central government. Frankly, I wouldn’t trust this lot with my childrens’ pocket money if this is their idea of value for money. Thanks for rooting this information out, Murky – don’t suppose we’d have heard about it otherwise – it certainly wouldn’t have been headline news in Binfo.
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