Dr Sean Sweeney, Chief Executive, City Rail Link Ltd
21 February 2022
Politics plays a big role in the City Rail Link project. The Crown is one of our two sponsors – the other is Auckland Council – and it’s fair to say that we get a lot of positive support from all sides of the political spectrum. But there’s no escaping the fact that those in the ‘big house’ at Parliament in Wellington do like to keep an eye on how the funds we receive from both New Zealand taxpayers and Auckland ratepayers are being spent.
Fronting up to scrutiny from Parliament’s transport and infrastructure select committee has become an important part of our job. This year was no different except that me and my Chairman, Sir Brian Roche, were able to demonstrate to the committee one of the biggest challenges facing CRL – even before one single word had been spoken.
Our meeting with the politicians representing Labour, National, the Greens and ACT had to be conducted on-line – we couldn’t make our usual face-to-face visit to the committee room because of covid. And it was the pandemic and its on-going impact for CRL that dominated much of the conversation we had via cyber space.
We told the committee pretty bluntly that there was no doubt that Covid had thrown a spanner in the works for CRL.
The impacts, as I see it, are deep, wide and ongoing. Among them are not having a migrant workforce to call on, a shortage of specialists, material shortages, a dramatic increase in building costs, and supply chain constraints and delays.
All together, they have inserted exceptional uncertainty into the project.
That’s not to say the project spends its time railing against life’s challenges. We get on with the job and our message to the select committee was pretty clear and positive – great progress continues to be made.
In spite of losing six weeks to a covid lockdown, one of our big milestones this summer has been handing back to Auckland Transport and KiwiRail the first railway line built under the project. That’s the result of enormous cooperation. Add to that our Tunnel Boring Machine completing if first drive – later than originally planned because of covid but well ahead of the revised breakthrough date.
We hope to have a resolution of Covid’s impacts later this year.
Sir Brian did, however, have a warning for the committee’s MPs. Our $4.4bn project will require additional funding. In his words, “…this is a significant project and so the claim will be significant.”
He left it up committee members to allocate whatever number they thought was “significant” given the pandemic.
That number will be made public as will any change to the timeline around completion.
We’ve still got work to do on both those challenges.
At the end of the year, we will have all the consenting, utility relocation, procurement, excavation. Mining and civil construction will be finished or nearly finished and the tunnel and rail system implementation will be underway – transformation from a construction to a rail project. Importantly, we will be further through the pandemic and life will be a bit more reliable.
The next time we meet the select committee there will, hopefully, be more clarity to share with MPs, but I do know from experience already that Covid’s shadow can be a long and unpredictable one.