TfL boss reveals amount spent on canned Rotherhithe Crossing

Transport for London (TfL) spent around £13M developing plans for the River Thames bridge between Canary Wharf and Rotherhithe before shelving the project, it has been revealed.

TfL investment delivery planning director David Hughes told the London Assembly budget and performance committee that £13M had been spent working up designs for a lifting bridge and carrying out a value engineering study.

Plans for the Rotherhithe crossing were shelved last month when TfL decided the £600M cost estimate was not value for money.

“The total spend has been £13M. This does include some work on the ferry options, but the bulk of that has been spent on the bridge," Hughes said.

Hughes also said that thousands of pounds will also be needed to close remaining contracts for the project to finish the design.

He added that "the plan now is to take that work to a sensible end point so we have a design that could be taken forward in the future".

Hughes said TfL had struggled with an accurate cost estimate because of its inexperience with bridge construction and labelled the first estimate of £100M for the project as "bizarre".

"The original cost estimate of this bridge being £100M, I find to be bizarre, […] it just reached a cost where this was no longer representing value for money,” Hughes said.

“The issue around estimates are more with innovative projects, the Rotherhithe bridge is an example of this because we don’t do many bridges. […] Long span lifting bridges is not in our DNA.”

The proposed 90m tall vertical lift bridge, spanning 180m, would have been the world’s longest and tallest vertical lift bridge.

Instead TfL is now looking at the feasibility of a ferry scheme tabled by Thames Clippers and marine engineering firm Beckett Rankine.