CLM, cost controllers for London Olympics, paid £151 million last year

Consultants tasked with keeping the bill for the London Olympics under control cost the taxpayer £151 million last year, including a £60 million bonus, it was revealed yesterday.
CLM, a consortium of surveyors overseeing the £8.1bn Olympic construction project, received the fee in a year when the taxpayer was forced to bail out the Athletes’ Village and the media centre after the collapse of a private financing deal.
The amount was nearly double the £87 million previously paid to the consortium, which includes Laing O’Rourke, the developer, Mace, the British management company, and the programme manager CH2M Hill.
The size of the fee emerged as Olympic chiefs awarded themselves generous pay rises, with three years to go until the start of the Games in 2012.

Staff at the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) shared £30 million, including £2 million of bonuses, according to the annual report for the year to March 31.
David Higgins, the chief executive, took home £537,000, although he bowed to the prevailing public mood and deferred half of his annual £210,000 bonus until 2012.
The Australian is still one of the best-paid public sector employees in Britain. Hugh Robertson, the Tories’ Olympic spokesman, said: “He’s doing an extremely good job but in the current climate everybody in the public sector must be aware of the need to bear down on bonuses and expenses.”
Mr Higgins and seven fellow directors collectively claimed £100,000 in expenses. Howard Shiplee, director of construction, was the highest spender, claiming £19,343, including £11,478 on hotels and nearly £2,280 on taxis.
Tom Brake, the Liberal Democrat Olympics spokesman, said: “These bonus and expenses arrangements are from a different era. We are now in tougher times where costs have to be more tightly controlled.”
The figures were released on the day the outer shell of the £547 million Olympic stadium was completed.
Olympic chiefs justified their pay because the complex 2012 project remains on schedule and on budget despite the recession.
John Armitt, the chairman who earned £250,000, said: “We have hit all, and exceeded some, of the ten milestones we set ourselves last year.”
By 2012, the estimated total paid to consultants will have reached nearly £680 million. Ministers have argued that the sum will prove value for money if there are no delays to the building programme.
The closer the completion deadline, the more quickly costs tend to escalate.
An ODA spokesman said: “We are not talking about consultants in suits. These are very experienced engineers, planners and construction experts who have worked on several Olympic Games. CLM’s contract is also heavily incentivised. Every penny earned is dependent on meeting strict performance measures tied to delivering on time, to budget and to a high standard.”
However, taxpayers may baulk at the cost, after they came to the rescue of two of the biggest venues on the Olympic Park. In May, the Government approved a further injection of £324 million into the £1 billion Village, which will house 17,500 athletes and officials during the Games, bringing public investment in the project to £650 million. The £355 million media centre had already been nationalised after private financing failed to materialise.
Ministers have insisted that the overall £9.3 billion public sector budget for the Olympics will not be exceeded.
The latest accounts revealed that the ODA wrote off £7.5 million in design and professional fees for work on the media centre. It also bore the cost of £2.5 million in legal fees incurred on behalf of Lend Lease, the property developer that pulled out of the Village financing deal.
A further £1.1 million in design fees were written off when the site of the canoeing venue was changed.
Source:The times