Could £13m be better spent in NI??

dmxdave

Maybe I am getting more cross in my old age but this makes me angry!!!!

£13m spent on schools never built

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-17104548

:mad:

getzls

Something wrong there of course. That would have got Bangor Central + another school built.

Golden_Anemone

Absolutely shocking!!! :mad: The worst sort of headline grabbing distortion possible. :eek:

How much bigger a scandal would it be if a government department ignored all legislative and regulatory requirements and spent no money on feasibility studies, estates planning, equality impact assessments, environmental impact assessments, traffic management assessments, building and planning control applications yadda yadda yadda and just went ahead and spent 100s of millions of capital funds without?

If the average cost of these 52 new builds is in the region of 10 million for each, then the 13 million preparatory work represents about 2.5% of the total cost.

Personally I don't think that screams "waste of public funds". Do you?

Now hindsight is a wonderful thing and the fact that there is now no capital funding to build schools that have been promised for years is an entirely different headline all together.

And you will never know how much it pains me to be arguing in the defence of the Department of Education.

A.L.D.A

In the past I have found that many of these problems are caused by a political change of policy, which disrupts the planned programme.

Another little problem that I could never quite get my mind around was the inability to carry forward unspent funds. That often lead to very poor decisions.

Mistral001

These are design costs. Most design is done before building of the school is commenced and can take several years if it is to be done properly. The alternative is to use one standard off-the-shelf design. Maybe not a bad idea. Pick the best design and then improve on it again and again as each new school is built. Cost of design would be halved I would imagine.

saverbuyer

250,000 people employed in the public sector, the nous must be available to do more in house?

Golden_Anemone

Actually much of those costs will have been in-house costs!

All the architectural, design, QS etc. P&T staff employed by NICS departments have to account for all their time and their fees are included in the costs of any project.

The article is so lazy!!! It completely ignores the fact that many of our useless politicians largely mis-use Assembly Questions to either attack their political opponents by asking pointed questions to attract adverse media attention to a department for which their party isn't responsible, or the reverse - asking pointless questions about "good" news in ridiculous displays of sycophancy. If there was a genuine scandal to highlight they would all club together to cover it up - for the good of the country!

The media latch on because it fills space and ensures they don't have to find real news to report.

screwedagain

saverbuyer wrote: »

250,000 people employed in the public sector, the nous must be available to do more in house?

Ah yes, but then who do they have to blame (or sue) if something goes wrong?

I have to say though, I don't like the term 'consultant' or 'consultancy fees' - it could mean any number of things, and gives the public, and seemingly some MLA's the impression £13m has been spent on some wishy-washy advice on something that they don't understand and therefore assume isn't really necessary.

What they fail to realise is that many of these schools that were never built would have been designed to the most minute detail i.e. everything from the site orientation and building form to meet planning regulations, to how it connects to the local sewage network, traffic assessment/analyses to determine access road layouts, electrical/gas loads and the subsequent carbon footprint of the building and how to reduce same to meet building regulations, even the colour of the walls, where the light switches and smoke detectors go, and everything inbetween.

This is specialist, professional, detailed work that has to be carried out pre-construction to ensure that value for money is obtained on the construction cost. You can't just start a project on site and make it up as you go along, you might as well sign a blank cheque for the contractor every month. Then who would be complaining about public funds being wasted? :eek:

Mistral001

screwedagain wrote: »

Ah yes, but then who do they have to blame (or sue) if something goes wrong?

I have to say though, I don't like the term 'consultant' or 'consultancy fees' - it could mean any number of things, and gives the public, and seemingly some MLA's the impression £13m has been spent on some wishy-washy advice on something that they don't understand and therefore assume isn't really necessary.

What they fail to realise is that many of these schools that were never built would have been designed to the most minute detail i.e. everything from the site orientation and building form to meet planning regulations, to how it connects to the local sewage network, traffic assessment/analyses to determine access road layouts, electrical/gas loads and the subsequent carbon footprint of the building and how to reduce same to meet building regulations, even the colour of the walls, where the light switches and smoke detectors go, and everything inbetween.

This is specialist, professional, detailed work that has to be carried out pre-construction to ensure that value for money is obtained on the construction cost. You can't just start a project on site and make it up as you go along, you might as well sign a blank cheque for the contractor every month. Then who would be complaining about public funds being wasted? :eek:

I agree. Just a use of words to put a political slant on things and the journalists of course being journalists just swallow it without looking any deeper into it.

Call it what it is rather than lumping it under one heading of consultancy. This £13M most likely consists of architectual design, quantity surveying preparation of bills of quanties, civil engineering design, heating and electrical design etc. etc. All time-consuming detailed work. All has to be mostly complete before work starts on site.

NAR

This is just, yet another, fine example of sloppy journalism IMHO. :mad:

Golden_Anemone

I agree completely about the sloppy journalism - Bel Tel has gone to the dogs of late - but I do think our lazy politicians are a much more serious problem.