Cardiff Bay Barrage (Hansard, 10 July 1992)

HC Deb 10 July 1992 vol 211 c355W 355W

§ Mr. Morgan
To ask the Secretary of State for Wales, pursuant to his financial memorandum on the updating of the costs of the proposed Cardiff bay barrage, if he will specify which sewer diversion works have already been paid for by Welsh Water and in the course of construction of the Butetown link section of the South Glamorgan county council's peripheral distributor road.

§ Mr. David Hunt
The sewers removed from the table of related expenditure in the note on the comparison of costs provided for the members of Standing Committee F on the Cardiff Bay Barrage Bill are as follows:
i. The Cogan outfall proposals
These are now within the programme of Welsh Water Plc for diversion by 1994.
ii. Pierhead combined sewers north of James street
The main diversion works, including the Harrowby Street Pumping Station, have been constructed by South Glamorgan County Council as part of the Peripheral Distributor Road scheme. The diversion of flows south of the Peripheral Distributor Road remains within the estimate.

§ Mr. Morgan
To ask the Secretary of State for Wales what is the most up-to-date estimate available to him of the cost of(a) the remedial drainage works and (b) basement waterproofing works to compensate for the effects of the Cardiff bay barrage arising from paragraph 7 of the Roy Stoner report published in January and costed on an outturn basis, using the same hypothesis on the timing of start and finish of construction as in his answer of 26 June, Official Report, column 340.

§ Mr. David Hunt
The £440,000 for remedial drainage works mentioned in Mr. Stoner's report would have an outturn cost of £496,000. As Mr. Stoner observed, it can be argued that since the areas involved are inadequately drained at the moment, the whole charge concerned with land drainage should not fall upon the barrage project.
The cost of remedial works to property based on Hydrotechnica's most likely scenario would be £14.43 million at 1991–92 prices, which would become £17.47 million on an outturn basis. This figure was included in the £167.4 million given in my answer of 26 June. The outturn figure would be increased by a further £11.18 million if Hydrotechnica's "extreme case" of groundwater levels were to arise. However, as Mr. Stoner commented in his report, generally one would expect that the levels experienced in practice would be lower".