It's unsurprising if Gilligan's pro-Crossrail, as the Evening Standard is pro the kinds of projects that interest out-of-town commuters, because, as you point out, they are its target readers.

But it seems supremely dumb to accuse Gilligan of covering up the cost of Crossrail or trying to protect Ken Livingstone. Umm, Gilligan's devoted his career to destroying Ken Livingstone - any newspaper-reading Londoner could tell you that.

Gilligan has also several times warned about the spiralling cost of Crossrail for Londoners, even if he thinks the project is worthwhile.

I refer you to: "£16bn bill that must keep Ken awake at night"

 http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-mayor/article-23465931-details/%C2%A316bn+bill+that+must+keep+Ken+awake+at+night/article.do

That's hardly covering up the cost, is it? That's a more damning bit of investigation into the project's costs than the frankly weird, scatter-gun accusations we get on here from No to Cross Rail.

Quick addition to that - the whole point of Notocrossrail's posting was to accuse Andrew Gilligan of trying to cover up the real cost of Crossrail.

Here's what Gilligan wrote about Crossrail just before the Mayoral election:


"Yet last week, unnoticed amid the synthetic cries of doom, Planet Ken did mention one thing that could genuinely damage London's public services beyond repair, could genuinely destroy any Mayor in its path, and could genuinely come to deserve that overused word "disaster". Unfortunately, it's an issue of Mr Livingstone's own making.

That issue is Crossrail, the £16 billion, seven-mile central-London rail tunnel linking existing surface lines in "the largest transport project in Europe". Mr Livingstone, as ever, is claiming credit for bringing the parties together to agree the route in "one of the most spectacular negotiations of the Mayoralty".

That might surprise the Government, which actually chose the route, which is paying the largest single grant, £5.1 billion, towards the cost, and which in 2005 described Mr Livingstone's interventions over Crossrail as "not terribly helpful". Ultimately it was Gordon, not Ken, who pressed the start button. Another £2.3 billion will come from the state-owned Network Rail and about £600 million from BAA, Canary Wharf and the City.

But it is true that Ken's body TfL will own the company which builds Crossrail. TfL will also contribute £2.7 billion in grants, £1.1 billion from savings and land sales, secure £300 million in further developer contributions and take out £3.5 billion in loans, with the interest funded by a new supplementary business rate and the principal repaid from fare revenues once the line is open.

That is scary enough for London taxpayers. What if savings, land sales and developer contributions fall short? What if fare revenues cannot repay that monster loan? But the really frightening part is what Ken's "spectacular negotiation" has lumbered us with if the cost goes above £16 billion. Last Thursday, in a speech at Canary Wharf, he said he had agreed a deal in which every penny of any overrun must be paid by Londoners.

In the Mayor's words: "As a highly placed official in the Treasury put it during the negotiations: 'You're taking the risk.' ... If the project goes wrong, then London alone picks up the cost. The national government's contribution-is fixed." An overrun, Ken continued, could " devastate London's finances", imperil "the ability to afford police and other services" and bring "30 per cent increases in fares and doubling of supplementary business rates".

The reason this is a real and terrifying prospect is that few recent British transport projects have come in anywhere near their initial pre-construction budgets. The West Coast Main Line modernisation is costing around £8.6 billion, nearly four times the original estimate. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link was budgeted at £3 billion; it came in at £5.2 billion. The Highways Agency's 36 most recent major road improvements cost 40 per cent more than originally estimated. The Jubilee Line extension went £1.4 billion over.

If Crossrail overran by Chunnel Link proportions, that would be £12 billion - four times the cost of the Metropolitan Police. Repaying this sum over 10 years through the council tax could, with interest, put perhaps £500 a year on your bill. The alternative would be savage cuts in services."

--

So, yes, Notocrossrail has just attacked a journalist who has... erm... probably done more to draw Londoners' attentions to the spiralling costs of Crossrail than anyone else.

Oh dear.

you do carefully avoid the fact that I reference the fact that post death of Dr Kelly coward Gilligan defends both city stooges Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone, the supporters of Crossrail. Odd that you try and misrepresent the truth by trying to imply it is solely about Ken Livingstone, what are you worried about Norville B?

Is it the City, are you concerned about the City? Perhaps their incompetence? Perhaps the billion dollar losses?

The City of London particularly the Corporation who cause such world carnage at their medieval banquets are the most corrupt and morally bankrupt institutions, both of which are financed by the public. Furthermore, the blue chip companies they represent do not pay taxes in the UK and are destroying the environment and our planet every day. Money is what they worship. Money is a worthless illusory tender which pretends to give you a fair value for enslaving people who work for the system and pay extortionate prices for goods readily provided by nature except for where companies destroy the thriving patterns. They want to produce arms to create wars, control food supplies through environmental destruction and experimentation. How do they make money? Are they clever? no they are known as the thick as a brick bunch. they have no ideas but they are bullies through intellectual property law and they are good deceivers. So again, how do they make money? Well the people at the top squeeze the most from the people at the bottom who do the most and get paid the least. It is not about left or right but about right and wrong for the planet. Make it right for you.

Crossrail replicates the model of corription courtesy of Ken and Boris Johnson, the public pay for it courtesy of fat Boris and fat Ken and the City benefit from it courtesy of Ken and fat Boris.

Shares and commodities, an Anglo and UK invention, the two establishment led nations with the most in common with Nazis bar the Italian political establishment. That aside, the invention called commodities is where they fix the price and only the pointless middleman makes money.

a bit thick aren't you Norville and can you not put your arguments in one post, needed help from your colleagues from the City

Londoners, FT and other papers mentioned Crossrail's pit well before Gilligan and his coverage is far from the reality of the problems to be faced by London because of Crossrail.

According to some residents groups facing harm because of the development project disguised as public transport.
Crossrail is likely to be the predicted bottomless pit using taxpayers’ money for the lifetime of the project unless the Treasury protects them from a Eurotunnel Millennium Dome fiasco. 1 Similarly to the Olympics, we share the view in Whitehall as stated in your report: “the project’s backers are likely to keep cost projections as low as possible to secure approval”. On April 25, 2007, Tom Harris, MP and Crossrail Minister said costs were cut from £7.8bn to £6.2bn but the project would still cost around £15-16bn. Yesterday’s Financial Times reports the project backers saying Crossrail will now cost £15bn with a third coming from fares. Yet the likely revenue are in fact estimated to be £200 million a year leaving the public to pay for the interest payments on a shortfall of at least £4-5billion. 2 Crossrail is touted as a London wide public rail scheme. It will primarily benefit the City and Canary Wharf but will be paid for by taxpayers. To date, in newspaper reports, the business community has offered not guaranteed to pay a token one-off contribution even though the City and Canary Wharf are the primary beneficiaries of the Crossrial scheme. Reports of Crossrail’s costs vacillate as much as projected benefits but there is a distinct lack of substantiated evidence. 3 On April 25, 2007, the Society wrote requesting substantiated evidence about Crossrail’s lawfulness, funding and financing and is yet to receive a response. 4 A pattern has emerged about the Crossrail project, when the Promoter is asked for evidence of their claims – it is absent.

Shadow transport secretary Chris Grayling’s aide Campbell Storey, on the matter of the Crossrail Bill in its present form is quoted by Transport secretary Douglas Alexander as saying: "Funding, publicly our position is: we don't think the Government is serious about this. Privately: it is the wrong project (bad route, too expensive) and we wouldn't want to be associated with it." Indeed, Mr Grayling says: “There are problems with the route and with the costings.”

Is it odd Gilligan did not cover this, no, he had no intention of telling London what is really going on... he is a toad and stooge of the City now...

 http://burningourmoney.blogspot.com/2007/10/crossrail-how-much-really.html

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 05, 2007
Crossrail- How Much Really?

So Gordo has given the pre-election go ahead for Crossrail, Britain's biggest civil engineering project since Hadrian's Wall. It's supposedly going to cost £16bn, but if you believe that, you obviously haven't been paying attention.

The cross-London tunnelled rail project has been around since the days of purple velvet flares, and during its many decades enmeshed in Whitehall bureaucracy its costs have spiralled wildly.

Back in 1991, the Crossrail Bill reckoned it would cost £1.4bn. Which means that in just 16 years, costs are up by well over 1000%! Over the same period, the general price level (the GDP deflator) has increased by just 50%.

Even 4 years ago, costs were "only" £10bn. Now they're £16bn, 60% higher. And the project still hasn't got going yet.

You'd almost think they were plucking figures out of the air.

Or somewhere.

Now, let's set on one side the fact that this ancient much delayed project probably no longer meets London's current needs (see this critique by the excellent John Kay). As taxpayers, let's just focus on how much it's likely to cost us really.

Virtually all public sector projects over-run their budgets: as regular readers of BOM will know, international research shows 90% over-run (eg see this blog). They do so for a number of reasons, including incompetence, wishful thinking, and deliberate manipulation by politicians and public officials (aka Salami Slicing). The only real question is how much?

The recent TaxPayers' Alliance analysis of over 300 public sector projects completed since the start of 2005, or still ongoing, revealed that the average over-run is about one-third (see here). On that basis, the final cost of Crossrail might be around £21bn.

But that overall average does not necessarily capture the risks associated with mega civil engineering projects like this.

According to the Treasury's own estimates (see table posted in this blog) the prospective over-run on "standard" civil engineering projects in the public sector is up to 44%, and on "non-standard" projects it's up to 66%. There are no prizes for guessing which category boring two massive 20 ft diameter tunnels under the geologically challenged and crowded basement of London falls into. So that suggests a final price tag of £25bn plus.

To Tyler, even that sounds light compared to other heroic tunneling projects. The Chunnel overran by about 80% (and that was quasi private sector), and Boston's notorious Big Dig, originally budgeted at $2.6bn, eventually came in at $15bn- an overrun of nearly 500%.

So £25bn? £30bn?

Whatever the eventual guargantuan bill, remember it's us taxpayers on the hook. True, the government has got a £500m contribution from Canary Wharf (private cash), plus a £200m contribution from Grupo Ferrovial SA's BAA unit (also private cash). But the rest comes in one way or another from taxpayers. Including the full cost of all overruns (as Red Ken confirmed today).


We need to be afraid.


Very, very afraid.