It is no surprise that Ministers have little to say about the fact that the construction contract for the new £710m hospital has, as yet, not been signed. Commercial negotiations are clearly continuing, and they will want to make sure that nothing is said which will make them more difficult to bring to a successful conclusion.
The new hospital is the most high-profile project in the Island at least since the turn of the millennium, and arguably, for many decades before that; it has that profile for many reasons, but chief among them is its obvious importance.
Once all of the noise surrounding its tortured path (to date) from concept to construction has been dialled down, the simple fact remains that it is unarguably an essential development.
But that doesn’t mean the price of building it is unimportant, or that any number is acceptable just to get it over the line. The construction industry has been under growing pressure for some time, and clearly the war in the Middle East will be making a bad situation much worse, with no telling what the true effect will eventually be both on pricing, but also on confidence – or for how long it will continue.
When Ministers selected a preferred tenderer for the 50,000m2, five-storey hospital last November those exact circumstances could not have been foreseen.
Regretfully, that is the nature of commercial negotiations, and Ministers will need to stay firm in their resolve to get the best deal they can.
The fact that some might want the deal signed before the elections is a pressure of a rather different sort.
Firstly, there is the suggestion that it needs to be done quickly, before the Government goes into its self-imposed ‘period of heightened sensitivity;’ such a notion is utter nonsense, the guidelines for official activity in this period clearly (and rightly) give plenty of latitude for decisions of this importance, and there is also precedent for it, not least on this actual project in 2022. The current Ministers have the authority to act, and if they need to, they should do so, for as long as they remain in office – they have already been elected to take these decisions.
What they should avoid is being railroaded into a decision, simply because that election is in the offing; of course, being able to say that they “got Overdale done” is important. But acceding to that pressure only puts the island in a weaker negotiating position, and in that sense, they need our support to hold on to get the best deal for the Island.
