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Matthew Vella
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has two major headaches, according to Peter Preston, the former long-time editor of The Guardian and a director of The Guardian foundation, and that’s not only Iraq, but curiously, a ‘Swedish hospital’, one whose medical side-effects have also lodged themselves in Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi’s psyche.
Maltese newspaper editors who lunched with Preston earlier this week however failed to latch on to the fact that Stockholm-based Skanska, the Swedish firm entrusted with the design and construction of the harried Mater Dei Hospital, has had its record tainted in the redevelopment of the Royal London hospital, after London Mayor Ken Livingstone threatened to veto the GBP 1 billion hospital unless substantial improvements to the design plans were re-submitted by the Skanska Innisfree consortium.
Dubbed an architectural “failure”, the Skanska plans for the new Royal London hospital, a 905 bed, 18 storey inner-city hospital in East London, were criticised by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), the UK government’s design watchdog.
Skanska’s London debacle must offer some solace to Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, who not only inherited Skanska as designers and operators at Mater Dei but equally worrying, the Foundation for Medical Services, the unit set up to manage the new hospital. The latter have managed until now to shrug off any form of responsibility for the project that is seen as former Premier Eddie Fenech Adami’s brainchild.
CABE described Skanska’s design plans as having been “seriously flawed” and lacking in “patient-friendly qualities”. CABE said the standard of the design had fallen a “long way short of what ought to be expected of one of the largest public sector buildings in the country.”
Livingstone has made it clear that he will refuse the application if improvements are not made.
The design plans which Skanska presented for the Royal London hospital were described as offering a project that recreated “some of the mistakes made in large projects in the 1960s”. Its high-rise tower block and its brightly-coloured sides were refused for fear that the block would represent just another ‘modern’ design bound to be outdated soon after completion: “What looks new and modish now may look dated even by the time the building is finished, let alone decades later. We believe that buildings have a duty to represent more enduring qualities.”
CABE, which reviews all major building projects, had been working with the Skanska Innisfree consortium and its architects HOK for two years in a bid to improve the design of the new hospital, but complained that the consortium had failed to act on its advice to improve the building.
Ken Livingstone, the London Mayor, concurred with CABE’s conclusions, and in August announced that plans had to be changed, after finding the hospital designs were not conducive to safety and would encourage anti-social behaviour: “The buildings lack clearly identifiable entrances and the location of some entrances would make it hard for people to find their way around. Substantially more work is also needed to ensure that the grounds and buildings would be fully accessible to everyone, including disabled people and people with mobility impairments.”
Livingstone has the power to refuse planning permission after concluding the proposal had failed to achieve Objective 6 of the London Plan, “to make London a more attractive, well-designed and green city”.
But the construction of the new Royal London and St Bartholemew’s hospitals in London, which have been contracted to Skanska, was also the subject of much controversy since they are part of the UK’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI), a public-private partnership contract which involves private companies in the provision of public services and which by 2010, will have provided 100 new hospitals.
The PFI, a scheme designed to deliver ‘value-for-money’ projects by contracting private firms to provide public services such as prisons and street-cleaning, was criticised by CABE as not encouraging good architecture and that the design plans had revealed failures in the process of hospital procurement.
The Skanska consortium was dogged by allegations of conflicts of interest during the bidding process for the rebuilding of the hospitals, after a patients’ watchdog said that a former Royal London chairman and two former Barts chief executives were working for Innisfree, the British investment firm which teamed up with Skanska for the bid.
Critics said the former senior managers, some of whom had been found guilty of manipulating waiting-list data to make the hospitals’ performance look better, would end up being involved in the running of the new hospitals again.
Under a PFI scheme, housing estates, schools or hospitals have to be designed, built, financed and managed by a private sector consortium, which is paid from public money according to performance over a period of 30 years.
Critics say that like hire-purchase, PFI schemes are more costly than actually borrowing money for one-off payments like hospital construction, and do not necessarily deliver value for money.
Skanska Profile
Skanska AB was founded in 1887 and built Sweden’s first concrete bridge in the same year. According to UK civil justice organisation The Corner House, today Skanska is Scandinavia’s largest construction group with 39,000 employees and one of the major property owners in Sweden. The group is divided into four areas of operations: Skanska USA, Skanska Sweden, Skanska Europe and Skanska Project Development and Real Estate.
Skanska’s largest shareholders are investment company Industrivarden, Swedbank and Inter IKEA, part of the IKEA home furnishings group. The company also has around 50 subsidiaries, including Beers Construction (USA), Costain Group (UK), Poggenpohl (Germany), and Tidewater (USA).
Skanska has also been involved in the construction of dams worldwide, many of them the subject of intense criticism from environmental and development groups. In September 2000 however, Skanska pulled out of a consortium to build the controversial hydroelectric dam in Ilisu, Turkey, which according to Friends of the Earth UK, after reports of forceful eviction of natives at gunpoint.
matthew@newsworksltd.com
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