Garden bridge's future in jeopardy as judicial review is granted
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Version 0 of 1. It has been slammed as a mayoral vanity project that will crash-land in the middle of the Thames, bringing heaving crowds to the south bank and destroying cherished views across the river. It is an attraction that has already been promised £60m of public funding, and could be maintained at an indefinite cost to the taxpayer – an imposition that has corralled groups as disparate as St Paul’s Cathedral and the London Wildlife Trust together in opposition. But now, the proposed garden bridge looks set to face a major setback, with permission granted for a full judicial review of the project. The legal challenge was launched in January by local resident Michael Ball, director of the Waterloo Community Development Group, who claims that in granting the project planning permission, Lambeth council had not properly considered the impact on views or the ongoing maintenance costs – which are estimated at £3.5m a year. The courts ruled in March that any questions about funding the maintenance were academic, since the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, had promised to guarantee these costs. But today Mr Justice Ouseley ruled that Lambeth may have ignored potential funding gaps and made significant omissions – including the possibility that the Garden Bridge Trust goes bankrupt – with the public sector having to pick up the annual maintenance bill. In his ruling, Ouseley criticised the mayor for making statements at a Question Time session last month that could be understood “neither in terms of English, nor of what Mr Johnson intended”. Johnson had publicly denied that no more money would be spent on the project, beyond the £60m already committed to its construction – but at the same time he had agreed that Transport for London would underwrite the bridge’s maintenance costs in perpetuity, as the Guardian revealed last month. The ruling is likely to present a major setback for the Garden Bridge Trust, which insists construction work must begin by the end of 2015 to avoid a clash with the Thames Tideway Tunnel, one of the largest infrastructure projects in Europe. The Trust has always argued that funding is not an issue: it is confident it can raise the £175m capital budget and £3.5m annual maintenance costs from a combination of private sponsorship, gala events and merchandise sales. But questions have been raised about how this strategy will fare in the future, and if gala dinners and teeshirt sales can really see the annual target met in perpetuity. Mr David Forsdick QC, acting for Ball, stated that the terms of the planning permission meant that maintenance and funding issues needed to be faced before the bridge was built. He added that it would be unlawful for Lambeth council to delegate these matters to another council or the Mayor of London, but equally they may be guilty of simply assuming the funding would materialise. The judicial review – the costs of which Ball is currently crowd-funding – is expected to be heard in the High Court in June. • This article was amended on 28 April 2015. An earlier version said the RSPB was opposed to the bridge: in fact it has said it is “effectively neutral”. The article was also amended to remove out-of-date information about funding. |