Yahoo Finance Mace tipped to land deal to run £5.7bn Westminster refurbishment
The engineering group which threatened to derail the HS2 rail link is set for a leading role in the massive project to refurbish the Houses of Parliament.
Mace is understood to have won the lucrative contract to provide project management and cost management services advice on the work.
The privately-owned company has teamed up with American rival Aecom to manage the project.
Landing the deal is a major coup for Mace, which hit the headlines last month after it threatened to knock the £55bn High Speed 2 rail project off track in protest at losing out on a £170m contract to design parts of the line connecting Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds to rival CH2M.
Mace said CH2M should not have got the job because of a “revolving door” between it and HS2, with CH2M staff taking up senior positions on the project.
HS2 has been accused of being a “gravy train” for highly paid lawyers and consultants at vast expense to taxpayers, after it emerged that an army of more than 400 companies have been awarded contracts.
Parliament is a Grade I-listed building and Unesco world heritage site in need of massive restoration. Options for refurbishment range from politicians vacating Westminster entirely to allow work to be carried out to a complex “rolling” programme where parts of the building are shut off and repaired.
A wholesale move is seen as the cheapest and quickest option, with a recent Deloitte-led report estimating that it would cost £3.5bn and take six years. A rolling programme would cost £5.7bn and take 32 years, the accountacy firm claimed.
It was hoped that work would begin by 2020. But peers and MPs on the cross-party restoration and renewal committee say that more preparation work needs to be done, and other work nearby needs to be completed before the project can get under way.
