PRESSURES on the local building industry should not impact the timetable for the Island’s new healthcare facilities, the Chief Minister has said.
The multi-site solution, with its emphasis on a number of smaller projects undertaken over an extended period, should make delays less likely, Deputy Kristina Moore told a recent hearing of the Corporate Services Scrutiny Panel.
She was being questioned by Deputy Max Andrews about the potential impact on the Island’s limited workforce and the challenges reported by the local construction industry, and whether the multi-site option was, therefore, vulnerable.
“I would think it is quite the contrary,” Deputy Moore said.
“One of the risks with the previous project was that it was going to require a huge number of people to come into the Island to work on that project and there wasn’t really a clarity as to where they were going to live during that period and how they would be sourced from around the world.
“We feel that [the multi-site option] will be both affordable and deliverable, which is what we set out to achieve,’ she said.
“It’s taking a different approach.
“If one considers the previous project versus what is going to be delivered through this whole programme, the previous [one] would have been on a multi-site basis also because it did not include a number of items that are now factored into this programme.”