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If London garden bridge is cancelled, taxpayers may lose £20m says NAO reports

United Kingdom Architecture News - Oct 13, 2016 - 13:22   11769 views

If London garden bridge is cancelled, taxpayers may lose £20m says NAO reports

Ministers have repeatedly given more public money to London’s planned garden bridge, despite official advice against doing so, and risk losing more than £20m if the controversial project is cancelled, according to a report from the National Audit Office (NAO).

Civil servants were so worried about the scale of public underwriting of the scheme that they sought rare formal direction from ministers instructing them to commit extra funds to it, prompting David Cameron and George Osborne to express their frustration at delays to funding for the project.

The NAO, the independent government spending watchdog, noted a “pattern of behaviour” in which the Garden Bridge Trust, the charity behind the Thomas Heatherwick-designed project, repeatedly asked the government for more money when it encountered any challenges, which was then granted......Continue Reading

Top image © Heatherwick Studio/PA

> via The Guardian