Politics: The Full Cost Of Boris ‘Vanity’ Projects

The full cost of Boris Johnson’s schemes in London that critics have dubbed “vanity projects” has been put at nearly £1bn.

The scrapping of the former London Mayor’s ill-fated Garden Bridge across the Thames has exposed the huge bill from his time at City Hall and prompted a senior Labour MP to suggest her party is partially to blame for not scrutinising the projects more closely.

Margaret Hodge, a former Labour Minister whose review of the bridge led to its scrapping said she was shocked at how “ irresponsible” the Foreign Secretary had been with public money during his eight years as Mayor.

But during her review she was also struck by the lack of scrutiny of his spending. ”I kept thinking: ‘How the hell was he allowed to get away with this?’,” Hodge said.

An estimated  total of £940m was spent on eight projects closely associated with Johnson, which either failed or whose value for money has since been questioned. Johnson’s office insisted that the schemes represented important investments and that to describe them as vanity projects was “ignorant and wrong”.

Three Johnson projects ended in failure at a cost of more than £57.5m: the Garden Bridge. the purchase of second-hand water cannons; and the Thames estuary airport.

Five others: the new Routemaster bus; hire bikes; the Emirates Air Line cable car; the conversion of the Olympic Stadium and the ArcelorMittal Orbit helter-skelter, all did go ahead at a combined cost of more than £900m. They have all run into problems after turning out to be far more expensive than promised.

Hodge, a former chair of the House of Commons public accounts committee, said Labour should have imposed more checks on mayoral powers when it set up the post in 2000.

Labour assembly member Tom Copley said that now Johnson was Foreign Secretary there was even less scope to scrutinise his past decisions. “I don’t think we’ll know the full cost of Boris until a few years down the line,” Copley said.

The breakdown of each project:

The Garden Bridge. A project shaped by the Heatherwick design studio on which £37m has already been spent and another £15m has to be forked out because Londoners underwrote the project.

New Routemaster bus.The bill was £321.6m. Another Heatherwick-Johnson co-production that eventually cost more than Johnson originally suggested.

The Emirates Air Line cable car across the Thames from the Greenwich Peninsula to the Royal Docks turned out to be more expensive than planned and cost London £24m. The total cost of £60m to the airline and London made it the world’s most expensive urban cable car.

Water Cannon. Johnson’s decision to buy three Wasserweffer 9000 water cannon for £320,000 in 2014 followed police concerns about dealing with any repeat of the 2011 riots .

But it turned out to be a rash one, as he had not cleared it with the then Home Secretary, Theresa May. In the face of public opposition she outlawed the use of water cannon. They sit unused and unsold.

The Boris Bike.There were concerns about the lack of transparency around the initial sponsorship deal, which was kept secret for three years before it emerged that Barclays was able to claw back £2m it had put in. A new sponsorship deal with Santander covers only part of the costs, leaving TfL with an annual bill of £11m according to figures unearthed by the Taxpayers Alliance in 2013. An equivalent scheme in Paris makes £12m a year for the city.

Estuary airport £5.2m.TfL spent $5.2m on feasibility schemes for an airport in the Thames estuary that few others thought feasible.

Olympic stadium conversion £305.5m. Johnson inherited the Olympic stadium but its subsequent conversion to a football stadium happened on his watch. The costs were originally estimated to be around £154m but the bulk of the eventual £323m was paid by the taxpayer.

The AncelorMittalOrbital helter-skelter at the Olympic Park.This was conceived after Johnson bumped into the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal in a cloakroom at the World Economic Forum at Davos. In 2014-15 fewer visitors than expected meant the tower lost money.

by Bob Graham

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