The completion date for the new National Children’s Hospital is currently February 2025 but faith in the deadline is increasingly a triumph of hope over experience.
The National Paediatric Hospital Development Board (NPHDB), which is responsible for delivering the much delayed €2.24 billion plus project, has told the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee of fresh problems that may cause further delays.
BAM, the Dutch-owned construction firm that is building the hospital, has not told the NPHDB how it plans to meet the February deadline and according to the board is in breach of its contract and will be sanctioned. The company denies this.
The current row is part of a pattern that sees the NPHDB blaming BAM for delays – the hospital was due to open in 2022 – and for cost increases. BAM has not helped itself by adopting a combative stance at times, but in reality, the recent dispute is but the latest outworking of the original sin that has blighted the hospital since its inception.
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Such was the pressure to get the project off the ground in 2016 that work commenced before the hospital design had been finalised and costed. This is a common approach in projects of this type but as a report commissioned from PwC by the government found in 2019 the necessary controls required to mitigate the associated risks and consequences of this approach were not put in place. A guaranteed maximum price was agreed with BAM but, as the PwC report pointed out, the process by which it was done was poorly coordinated and controlled.
As a consequence, the project could never have been delivered within the financial parameters agreed, according to PwC, who attributed much of the responsibility to the NPHDB.
A key observation made by PwC is that if the true costs of the project had been known at the outset it probably would not have been built in its current form. It is worth focusing on this as we look to the opening of a truly world-class facility next year – and plan other major State investments for the years ahead.