The Government needs to make dramatic changes to improve transport infrastructure in the Thames Gateway project, if it wants to achieve its targets for the development, the National Audit Office warned this week.
The official watchdog criticised the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) for not having suitable programme management in place to ensure the project plans were more coherent, and called for changes to ensure investment was more integrated and that risks were better identified and managed. Transport is the Thames Gateway project’s ‘main driver and constraint’, and it was essential to overcome this. However, delivering the infrastructure continued to pose a major challenge. A significant hurdle which the Government faced was the time it took to build road improvements and new rail lines, which could take more than 10 years to complete.
The report referred to Barking and Dagenham Borough Council, which believed the Barking Riverside development was reliant on an extension to the Docklands Light Railway. The detailed planning and funding arrangements were not yet in place, which risked delay to the development. It stressed that the Government did not have a single overall, fully-costed plan for the programme to join up local initiatives, commit central government to key infrastructure projects, and consider progress across funding streams.

www.nao.org.uk

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