Click to get your own widget

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

THE MILLENIUM DOME COST £46 MILLION TO BUILD

This was the the bombshell dropped very quietly into Imagine on BBC 11.05 last night. It was a programme about the career or Richard Rogers, builder of the Pompidou Centre, LLoyds building, Millenium Dome, Madrid Airport Terminal etc etc.

He said specifically that the Millennium Dome had only cost £46 million to build & in a separate soundbite his partner said it was 7% of the official cost, which is pretty much the accepted building cost of £670 million.

Officailly
The Millennium Dome is the biggest dome in the world ... The overall cash budget of £758m comprises £670m base cost
according to the official website. There is a general suspicion that the final cost is actually close to £1 billion after you include all sorts of hidden subsidies.

I have blogged a number of times before about how dreadful the degree of government padding to public works projects is (eg the next Forth Bridge being 13 times more expensive, after inflation than the previous one or comparable works across the world). The Edinburgh tramline costing £600 million for one line. The quoted price for a Forth tunnel being £4,673 million when the Norwegians have regularly built equivalents at under £40 million.

Even so & even though I had thought I was cynical about it it is clear that I had underestimated the sheer useless waste in government papershuffling & profits.

This should be making headlines everywhere. It is not like Mr Speaker being found to ripped us off for a mere few hundred thousand this is big. As is the fact that Rogers & co were warned by the government not to speak even though theu were getting some comments from people who knew what it should have cost.

Meanwhile here are the official figures:

The Dome: (note *) 260
Construction & infrastructure 198
Exhibition & central attraction 95
Operations & running costs in year of operation
The Challenge 54
Central costs:
Marketing 29
Support services 34
Central Contingency 88

Comments:
Speaking of government waste, have you seen this?

It definitely shows the downside of using windmills (apart from the enormous cost vs the relative power produced compared to nuclear)


http://www.liveleak.com/player2.swf?token=cdd_1203701257

I'm sure you'll get a good chuckle out of it Neil.
 
Oh, I almost forgot. Make sure you have your audio speakers/sound system switched on in your computer when you play the file : )
 
Please allow me to try and put some extra information into the debate and put the Olympic Games into context. Information I am sure the Government would not want to offer up voluntarily. For Scotland with 10% of UK population, 10% of £50 billion is 5 billion. On a GDP of £86.5 billion, the loss is more or less equivalent to the amoiny the Scottish Government want to achieve with their 'Celtic Lion' economy. All they will do if successful is make up for what was lost in the financing mess of the Dome.

I entered the competition in 2001 to take over the running of the Millennium Dome. As a global environmental management centre. I entered as a project manager with an idea, years of experience, a business plan, but looking for the financial backing.

The projection was that costs to the economy due to environmental issues etc would be $1000 billion (£500 billion) per year by 2007. This in fact did prove correct, as confirmed by the reinsurer Munich Re in 2007.

The plan was to use the Dome as a NASA or Pentagon of the global environment. Resolving these costs as benefits to the UK economy. The technology had been developed it just needed implementing. Now realistically even a major project like this could not take on board all the global environmental challenges. A realistic goal was 10% of the service potential. 10% of £500 billion being, £50 billion generated for the UK economy. Remember that £50 billion.

This was the project the Government's own consultants wanted to back. On the competition criteria this is the proposal that should have won.

I refer you to this link, placed in November 2006.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ecodome/

Note the Government cannot challenge it on the factual content as it is all true. They know all the documentation etc supports the facts of the petition. You just cannot support it as a commercial endorsement, a £50 billion per year endorsement.

Against the competition criteria the Government gave the Dome to AEG, as part of the Olympic Bid.

But for example in the proposal there were flood models for the UK, which did in fact prove correct. Had the Government gone for the environmental centre the £5 billion of flooding in 2007 would not have occured. The prevention strategies would have been implemented.

Many people would have been alive today who died in the SE Asia Tsunami. The expert witness did not tell the inquest the full truth. There was a global environmental monitoring and alert system as part of the package, which would have saved many lives outside of approx 45 minutes travel of the pressure wave from the time of the quake.

When costing the Olympics what is not being revealed to the tax payer is that if the Government had stuck to the competition criteria for the 2001 dome competition, it would now be generating £50 billion per year for the UK economy and the world a much better and safer place.

The Dome is being used as part of the Olympic Bid. So in proper accounting that £50 billion loss every year should be included in the Olympic costs. The Government deciding to use the Dome as part of the Olympics instead of the environment centre loses £50 billion per year.

The set up costs for the environment centre would have come from the private centre. The venture capital was guaranteed if it had won to initiate the project. Then the big global reinsurers would have been brought in.

The Government has just had to make guarantees to the banks of £50billion to try and restore liquidity to the economy.

Something they would not have to have done had the followed the competition criteria and used the Dome as an environment centre and not part of the Olympic Bid
 
I'm not sure if I have got this right. Are you saying that putting a "global environment management centreQ" in the dome building (rather than some cheaper property not in central London for example) would have produced an income of £50 billion a year & aslo prevented flooding in 2007 & the Asian Tsunami (caused not by alleged climate change but by movement in the tectonic plates)?

If so i would be interested in knowing how.
 
Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

British Blogs.