Crossrail MD Keith Berryman on contractors, contingencies, and crossing under London

TWO DAYS after the Crossrail Bill achieved Royal Assent, its managing director Keith Berryman, who since August 2000 has been steering the Bill through Parliament, is showering his staff with gifts. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he says, out of breath, “I had to pop to the house to get some presents for people who are leaving.”

Now the Crossrail Bill has been passed, Keith Berryman’s parliamentary team is moving on. For more than eight years he has led a team of 75 people within Cross London Rail Link (CLRL) in getting the Crossrail Bill through Parliament.

After a torturous 20-year journey, the £16bn project to link Heathrow directly with London’s financial district has got the green light. But for Berryman, 61, there is still much work to be done.

By the time he’ll be able to ride the length of Crossrail – from Sheinfield in the east to Maidenhead in the west – he’ll be five years into retirement. “I was actually on holiday when Gordon Brown came round to the office to tell us we had got the funding,” he says. “My assistant rang me in Marbella to tell me.”

Crossrail’s 40m-deep tunnels will pass beneath the capital’s streets, passing by and below existing underground lines. It will mean existing underground stations will need to be extended below ground to service the new route.

As a result, there will be new stations at Paddington, Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Farringdon, Whitechapel, Liverpool Street and the Isle of Dogs.

Fresh from the scrutiny of Parliament, Berryman finds time to put the scope of Europe’s largest civil engineering project into perspective.

What is the value of Compulsory Purchase Orders needed for Crossrail?
The property acquisition is just under £1bn – so it’s a big job in itself. Then we’ll be making the appointments of design consultants and delivery partners over the next few months – they’re out to tender already.

Do you envisage problems with the CPOs?
There are always potential problems with CPOs – because people don’t like having their property taken off them. We don’t really expect too much trouble. We’re only taking three residential properties in the whole, and some flats in central London. Most of the properties we’re taking are commercial premises, but they are in areas where there are plenty of
offices for rent.

What amendments were made to the Bill in Parliament?
The main issue was the addition of a station at Woolwich, which was at the instigation of the House of Commons Select Committee. Apart from one or two minor modifications to entrances, and a new entrance at Liverpool Street that was it really.

Will the new station at Woolwich add to the cost?
It’s been agreed in principle to add an underground station at Woolwich without adding to the public cost. Negotiations are currently taking place with Berkeley Homes and the London Borough of Greenwich concerning the building and fitting out of the box structure of the station.

You’ve said construction ought to follow the strategy of Terminal 5. What did you mean?
We seek to learn lessons from Terminal 5 but what we won’t be doing is putting all the risk onto the client. What we’re trying to do is get a sensible sharing of risk between the contractors and us. Steve Roswell, who was the procurement director for the Highways Agency for six years, and was very instrumental in the Early Contractor Involvement scheme, is advising us on these matters.

How will you be sharing the risk?
There are a lot of problems with the size of the scheme and it’s difficult to get competitive tenders for everything.

We have one delivery partner who helps us with the programme management – that’s including what Network Rail does and what other members of the scheme do. Then we have another delivery partner – likely to be a separate one – who will be responsible for the new works which we’re building on our own and we’ll be heavily influenced by their approach.

What did you learn from the contractual horrors of the Channel Tunnel?
On the channel tunnel, the contractors actually set up a joint venture to build it in the first place – there was no client. Then they realised that doesn’t work. Contractors have to have somebody to respond to. Eventually they brought in Sir Alastair Morton who established a client body for the Channel Tunnel and that was a very important lesson for the industry generally, not just for us. There are roles, which have to be fulfilled, and it is no good expecting the wrong kind of people to fulfil the roles.

How many main packages will there be for contractors?
It will be a substantial number. It will be split into a number of contract packages, tunneling, station construction and fitting out, etc.

Will you be using project bank accounts?
I don’t think there is a commitment yet but our procurement guys are looking at that.

Has the central tunnel route been compromised since it was first proposed in the 1990s?
There was a safeguarding direction in place from 1992 that meant nobody has been able to put piles in that corridor since 1992.

The scheme we’ve got now is a bit different but the Liverpool Street to Paddington section has substantially used the alignment that was safeguarded. There have been some developments, mainly buildings with piled foundations, which have led to minor adjustments.

What are the biggest excavation challenges?
We’re drawing similar lessons from the Channel Tunnel Rail Link in terms of the ground conditions.

In the eastern part of London, particularly where the Pudding Mill portal is, there are a number of interesting challenges where we go directly underneath the River Lea. There are also National Grid’s 400 kV underground cables that are in the towpath of the River Lea, and that’s going to cause quite a problem. The ground is not too bad. It’s the proximity of the
features that is the issue.

At Whitechapel we’ve got some piled foundations that we’ll have to modify. We’ve also got bad ground in the Farringdon area that’s receiving a lot of attention.

How will you deal with the intricacies of integrating new stations with existing one’s?
The work around the stations is obviously much more complicated [than the tunnelling] in terms of actually working out the sequence of doing it.

There is a lot of negotiation with Network Rail and London Underground about how we interface with their works. Like any bureaucracy there are always challenges. Generally speaking, those relationships are pretty solid.

Where we break into the London Underground stations is complicated. There are a lot of issues around standards and procedures because running a railway service underground is something that requires high regard for safety. If it isn’t done properly it is dangerous. For that reason you have a lot of procedures, systems and methods of working designed to ensure safe conditions, but they aren’t always conducive to doing works on the stations for obvious reasons.

What risks have you recognised and what contingencies do you have?
One thing is for sure, some things will go wrong and we’ve got a comprehensive Quantified Risk Assessment to try and manage that. Escalation in material costs, shortage of labour, and the right type of skilled labour are all concerns. We’re trying to put in measures to ameliorate those problems.

We’ve been heavily involved in setting up an academy for tunnellers and other kinds of training schemes in conjunction with the industry. In the case of tunnelling we will probably be taking the lead on that.

Did you fear the project would be put-off again in the current economic climate?
The only doubt that I had was when London won the Olympics. At the time I thought the government would be reluctant to fund two big projects in London. But in fact it didn’t have that impact at all. When you think about the spending profile, the main spending of the Olympics will be finished before we start.

But won’t it absorb labour?
A lot of the trades that we will need for finishing off the stations are the same as the trades used for the Olympics. We would expect that we will start needing those types of people in about 2011/12 when all the Olympic work and legacy work will be coming to an end. So there should be a substantial labour force there.

Will contractors only be allowed to use directly employed labour?
We have a strong preference that wherever possible, the contractors will use directly employed labour, but it is not always possible. It has to be viewed with common sense. You have to get the people where you can get them. We won’t have hard and fast rules on that.

When will the first heavy construction work begin?
Construction will not start with an enormously big bang. There will be a lot of preliminary works to do before the main works can start.

The first construction work will be Tottenham Court Road Station, which we’ll be doing jointly with London Underground. They have a serious problem at Tottenham Court Road with congestion and they’re anxious to get on with it as quickly as possible.

The next one will be the Isle of Dogs Station at Canary Wharf, which will probably start early next year.

Boris Johnson has warned that Crossrail must not take priority over the upgrade of London’s tube network. Is he right to be concerned?
Yes, I think that is a sensible concern, but I don’t think it will. I think Transport for London (TFL) has got that pretty well tapered – particularly now as the Metronet situation is resolved. You’ve got to bear in mind that the whole programme of tube upgrades and improvements is massive – much bigger than Crossrail.