Hammersmith Bridge - H&F Leader's letter
Dear correspondentThank you for writing. I am very sympathetic to the points you make about thedisruption caused by the necessity to close Hammersmith Bridge for safetyreasons and would like to assure you that my team and I have been working atpace to find solutions to fix and re-open the bridge - the biggest problem beinghow to pay for these extremely expensive works.As you’ll be aware, the closure of Hammersmith Bridge encouraged a significantamount of party-political game playing - especially around the 2019 generalelection. Unfortunately, I think this has got in the way of progress and stillcontinues to do so. Quite of lot of the stories that have been put around aresimply nonsense. Chief amongst them is the claim that there has been a delay inagreement from the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham (LBHF) to pay ashare of the bridge repairs.I would like to take this opportunity to set out what has actually happened andwhat we are doing:1. My colleagues and I commissioned a comprehensive review (the firstever) of the structural integrity of the 134-year-old suspension bridge.LBHF procured a number of world-leading engineers who began to identifylayers of unchecked corrosion with each new specialist investigation.Eventually, and by using the latest technology, they found chronicstructural failures in the pedestals that hold the suspension mechanism inplace which indicated Hammersmith Bridge was at risk of catastrophic andpossibly imminent collapse. Along with Transport for London (TfL), LBHFhas developed an extensive repair plan. By the end of this year, LBHF willhave paid £8.6m towards the repair of Hammersmith Bridge.2. Hammersmith Bridge is extremely expensive to fix in comparison to otherLondon bridges. In part, that is because it is London’s earliest remainingexample of a suspension structure over the River Thames and is held inplace using unusual materials such as cast iron (which can shatter),wrought iron, and wood. Its suspension mechanisms are unique. It is oneof the earliest mechanical suspension bridges in the world.3. The extremely high £141m repair cost is unaffordable for LBHF as it wouldbe for all councils. Since 2010 the government has cut LBHF’s total annualnet budget from £184.345m to £124.458m this year. Even taking a loanwould cause significant cuts to local services or huge rises in council tax –things we won’t allow.4. LBHF and TfL applied to Government for funding for the works onHammersmith Bridge on three separate occasions; December 2019,February 2020, and June 2020. All three bids were rejected.5. The Leader of Richmond Council and I wrote to the Prime Minister on 24August asking for government help. Some days later, Department ofTransport (DfT) officials responded by advising LBHF and TfL officials that,the Prime Minister had called the Secretary of State for Transport andasked him, as a consequence of our letter, to act. They also advised thatthe PM wanted Hammersmith Bridge back open to, at least cyclists andpedestrians, as quickly as possible and that there would be money for thestabilisation works (£46m cost of works scheduled to begin in September2020, would have been completed in June 2021) but the DfT officialshadn’t decided what account to take the money from.6. On the evening of 8 September, I was advised that the Secretary of Statewanted to urgently speak with me the next day. My officials advised meDfT officials had told them the meeting was likely to confirm funds for thestabilisation works. Two meeting times were booked in but then cancelledand, instead, a new meeting was arranged at 11am on 9 September withBaroness Vere, a Parliamentary Undersecretary of State at the DfT.7. On 9 September, rather than deliver the news of the funding, BaronessVere advised me she would be leading a Government Taskforce and thatno money would be forthcoming until she and her DfT team had checkedthe work undertaken by the specialist engineers commissioned by LBHFand TfL. Baroness Vere told me her officials had suggested this work couldbe done within two weeks. I asked Baroness Vere if she knew what theSecretary of State and the Conservative Mayoral candidate would beannouncing at 11:30am as they were visiting Hammersmith Bridge.Baroness Vere said she had no knowledge such an event had been bookedin.8. Shortly afterwards also on 9 September the Secretary of State forTransport announced he was going to “... effectively take over this projectto make sure we bash heads together and get this thing sorted.”9. On 15 September I followed up my phone conversation with BaronessVere with a letter welcoming the formation of the Government Taskforceand suggesting an agenda which included “financing options” for its firstmeeting. Baroness Vere did not allow that and subsequently refused alldetailed discussions of finance at the Taskforce.10.On 15 October, at the fifth meeting of the Government Task Force,Baroness Vere announced a completely new position. She explained howshe had been thinking over the previous weekend about Norfolk andSuffolk county councils whom she had recently arranged governmentfunding of 80 and 85 per cent for bridges in Lowestoft and GreatYarmouth. She said that LBHF needed to put in a bid and would write tome to set out what that should contain. A number of the members of theGovernment Taskforce responded by explaining there had already beenthree bids and all had been rejected and this appeared to be a time-wasting measure. It was difficult to understand why this new position hademerged as LBHF is not a county council (London County Council wasabolished in 1964 and that role is occupied by the London Mayor) andunlike the bridges in Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth, Hammersmith Bridgeis largely used and therefore mostly benefits people outside ofHammersmith & Fulham.11.The reason for this new position became clear when it emerged sourcesclose to Baroness Vere had briefed residents’ groups with the claim thatthe reason the Government Taskforce had made no progress was becauseLBHF had not provided a financial bid or shown willing to pay anythingtowards the bridge’s repair. This is evidently wholly untrue but given theanxiety so many residents feel about the failure to move to the next stageof works, some people were taken in by it and were all too ready tobelieve that completely false explanation.12.On 27 October, Baroness Vere sent me the letter she had promised on the15 October. It sought to distance her and the Government Taskforce fromany responsibility for any action and made a series of inaccurate pointswhich I responded to on the 28 October. She did, however, confirm thatbridge maintenance “has historically been funded by TfL who prioritisedtheir funding to local boroughs for bridgeworks via Local ImplementationPlan funding”. She also recognised that “this is no longer available”.13.It is worth pointing out here that data from the Ministry for Housing,Communities and Local Government shows that, since 2010, only £100min total has been spent by London boroughs on maintenance and repair ofall London road and river bridges – equivalent to less than £400,000 peryear for each borough. Even then, most of that money was eventually paidby TfL or Government. The Bridge House Estate (a charitable trustestablished by royal charter in 1282) owns and maintains five of London’smost important and historic bridges. Their spend on Blackfriars Bridge,Southwark Bridge, London Bridge, Tower Bridge and the Millennium Bridgebetween 2011/12 and 2018/19 was an average of £1.3m per bridge perannum.14.Additionally, few bridges cost as much as Hammersmith Bridge to repair.For example, in 2013/14 the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelseapaid £2.6m towards the repair of Albert Bridge but TfL contributed thebulk paying £7.1m. Chiswick Bridge recently cost £9m to refurbish butthose works were fully paid for by TfL. Wandsworth Council is paying forthe refurbishment of Wandsworth Bridge itself, out of monies raisedthrough their Community Infrastructure Levy, only because TfL iseffectively out of funds and can no longer contribute. But those works areonly costing around £6m - significantly less than LBHF has alreadycontributed.15.On 28 October, I was unable to attend a public meeting arranged by CllrGareth Roberts, Leader of LBRuT because I was dealing with an imminentclose family bereavement. However, I was surprised to learn that theagreement of an independent chair had been dropped and Baroness Verehad not only insisted in chairing the meeting but used it to repeat thecompletely false line that LBHF had failed to make any bids or offer anyfunding whatsoever – a line that she had only detailed in writing to me theday before. Indeed, as I mentioned we have never been allowed todiscuss financing the bridge repairs at the Government Taskforce.16.On 25 November, I attended a Zoom meeting with Rt Hon Grant ShappsMP, the Secretary of State for Transport, Baroness Vere and a largenumber of DfT officials. It was a cordial meeting during which I advisedthem of the Ritblat/ Foster’s/ COWI alternative proposals that Sir JohnRitblat and I had been working on since the summer. The Secretary ofState told me that the government required an unprecedented 50 per centcontribution (roughly £64 million based on inflation reduced repair figure)from LBHF - equivalent to an £800 increase in LBHF residents’ council taxpayments. I explained I was very proud to have delivered the third lowestcouncil tax in Britain and would not in any circumstances be asking ourresidents to pay such an amount. I promised to send a letter, correctingsome of the inaccurate facts he had clearly been given, and setting outconfirmation of our funding commitment.17.There have been a series of constructive exchanges between theSecretary of State and me since that meeting.18.LBHF has commissioned a feasibility study into the Ritblat/ Foster’s/ COWIproposal for a temporary truss bridge which holds out the prospect of thebridge being fully re-opened in a far quicker timeframe than the existingplan. We will have more precise details on that when they finish theirstudy.19.LBHF officers, working with a series of sector-leading consultants, havealso developed a business case called the Outline Financial Plan (OFP).That will not only see Hammersmith Bridge repaired but offers value formoney to national and local taxpayers.20.The OFP was submitted to the Secretary of State by LBHF on 19 February.It also seeks to secure the long-term governance and funding measuresnecessary to see one of the world’s oldest suspension bridges repairedand reopened ASAP while guaranteeing its ongoing maintenance, so itremains a fully functional utility, (and a beautiful example of GreatBritain’s pioneering engineering heritage) into the 22nd century andbeyond.I assure you again, that my team and I will continue to work around the clockdoing everything we can to get Hammersmith Bridge repaired and reopened inthe shortest possible amount of time.Funding is the major issue holding back progress. I hope that together, theGovernment, TfL and LBHF will shortly be able to release news of a genuine stepforward.Meanwhile, I hope the Fosters/ COWI team’s work which LBHF hascommissioned and paid for will produce a lower cost, quicker solution.With kind regardsCllr Stephen CowanLeader of the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham
John Cameron ● 1860d3 Comments