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21
May
'Not our fault': Transport chief defies call to quit over soaring costs of £82.5m Kex Gill scheme
North Yorkshire’s transport chief has said £13.7 million in extra costs for the Kex Gill realignment are “not our fault” and is due to “bad luck”.
Cllr Keane Duncan, executive councillor for transport at North Yorkshire Council, told a full council meeting in Northallerton today (May 21) that additional costs to the project had arisen from a late funding award, design changes and ground conditions.
His comments come after the council’s executive voted on May 13 to put more taxpayers' money into the scheme, which has increased the overall cost from £68.8 million to £82.5 million.
The council’s ruling Conservative executive also agreed unanimously to commit an undisclosed sum of additional taxpayers’ money on further contingency funding to cover any more cost increases, such as weather delays.
The ongoing project to realign four kilometres of the landslip-prone route between Harrogate and Skipton is the biggest capital spending project ever undertaken by the council.
Contractors at Kex Gill.
In response to a question from Cllr Andy Brown, the Green Party member for Aire Valley division, on whether the additional costs to the scheme were due to “bad luck or bad management”, Cllr Duncan sought to address why the scheme had spiked in cost.
He said:
In terms of those extra costs, the largest so far has arisen from the late award of funding from the Department for Transport, that delay alone cost us almost £2.5 million. I hope that colleagues would reasonably conclude that this is bad luck on our part and bad management on the part of central government.
Additional costs have also arisen from a number of necessary design changes. The full details of those are confidential and sensitive. However, colleagues are welcome to access this information and if they do I would hope you would recognise that there is a potential case of bad management here too, not on the part of the council but a third party.
I also hope colleagues would support us as we consider legal routes of redress on this point. Additional costs have also arisen from poor ground conditions that we have encountered in several locations across the site. I hope that colleagues would recognise that this is nothing other than bad luck that this poor ground is more extensive than we had expected.
All of these extra costs could not have been reasonably foreseen. The extra costs are not our fault, but they are nonetheless our responsibility.
Cllr Brown also asked Cllr Duncan, who has oversight of the A59 project, whether he would consider resigning over “this grotesque overspend”.
Cllr Duncan said:
While I might not have the mystic powers and subterranean vision that Cllr Brown might expect of the executive member for highways and transport, I do take responsibility for this important project as does the wider administration too.
We will continue to be open, transparent and honest. We will continue to scrutinise every request for compensation robustly but where there are extra costs to pay, where we ultimately have no choice, we will pay to see this colossal and essential job through and to get this new road open as quickly as possible.
What is the Kex Gill scheme?
The A59 is the main route between Harrogate and Skipton.
The scheme at Kex Gill is the largest capital highway project ever undertaken by the former county council and now North Yorkshire Council.
It involves realigning four kilometres of the landslip-prone route, which has suffered 15 landslides in the last two decades at a cost of £6 million, according to the council.
The Department for Transport awarded £56.1 million, and the council initially contributed £12.7 million.
Construction work, which began in February 2023, comprises a 27.8 hectare working site, 12 new structures including two underpasses, walls and culverts, 4 km of new bridleways, 7 km of dry stone walls, 9 km of new drainage, the diversion of Hall Beck, planting 12,000 trees and shrubs, 12 km of utility diversions and reverting the existing A59 back to moorland. The report says work is ‘now just over halfway complete’,
Work to build the new road was supposed to take 113 weeks from January 2023 to March 2025.
But the finish dates has been put back to June 2026, which is the cause of one of the compensation claims. Once the new road is built, contractors will then complete a second phase of work decommissioning the existing A59 and turning it back to moorland, which is not now due to finish until March 2027.
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