CJ Construction Blog

At last the waiting is over and contractors are being invited to bid for the main tunnel drives on the £16bn Crossrail project.

The excitement and optimism about Crossrail is palpable even among hard-bitten civil engineering contractors. This is an important milestone because it is the clearest signal yet of the mood of confidence growing among the project's backers.

Preliminary works are underway, design work is well advanced and all the key engineering posts are filled.

For its part the contracting fraternity is primed and organised into consortia ready to get their teeth into bidding for the mammoth tunnelling contracts that make up the core of the biggest London transport project since the Underground.

Everybody needs Crossrail to progress. Not only because it is a boost to construction at a time when the going is tough, but also because this vital infrastructure project is capable of delivering wider economic benefits, estimated to be worth £38bn.

A project of this size will take months and thousands of man hours to bid, a cost that each consortium is happy to bear in a fair chase to win such a big prize.

But what happens if the project is significantly delayed or worse mothballed.

Cancelling the project at this stage would clearly be lunacy, but that doesn't mean that the prospect of a new Government reneging on funding should be ignored. On a project of this scale all possibilities have to be considered at the outset.

In such an event, it is clear there should be some provision put in place to refund contractors that will have spent millions of pounds bidding the project.

This does not undermine the process but serves to sweep away any nagging doubts in the bidding process.