Q81 Mr Khan: Would that not be a course of action worthy of exploration?
Mr Nettel: It has not occurred to us.
Q82 Mr Khan: You instruct experts to advise you, they help you prepare a report which is inadequate, £14.9 million are wasted.
Mr Nettel: Well there is room for argument there. Certainly, it is worth taking a legal view on it now you mention it. It is a reasonable idea, but I suspect that our lawyers will tell us that this is possibly a recipe for a significant legal cost without necessarily any redress because the consultants of course will in the circumstances, I suspect, have a defence which is that they took a brief from the organisations concerned and worked within that brief.
Q83 Mr Khan: Let us just follow that through. The London regional office said they had concerns about this inadequate plan and presumably you would have gone back to the experts and said "Hold on a sec, we paid you some good money for the advice, the NAO are concerned about this, what do you say to this?".
Mr Nettel: It did not quite work like that.
Q84 Mr Khan: How did it work?
Mr Nettel: The business case, as I referred to earlier, was agreed on the basis of a high level document and the regional office signed off that business case at the time, recognising that further work needed to be done, which incidentally did not involve the consultants that we used to draw up the original business case.
Q85 Mr Khan: Right, so you did not use experts to do the follow-up work.
Mr Nettel: We did indeed. For instance, we had some important financial analysis to do.
Q86 Mr Khan: Can we have a note of the experts that were used and how much they cost?4
Mr Nettel: Yes, all of that information is available and has been supplied to the NAO.
Q87 Mr Khan: Great. When the NAO made their concerns known to you, did you have those concerns signed off by them after you had dealt with them?
Mr Nettel: The documentation on that does not seem to suggest that is the case. I have looked at this from a St Mary's point of view and it is certainly the case that there was follow-up action on each of the items raised after the original business case.
Q88 Mr Khan: Why did the original project director leave after two years?
Mr Nettel: Mr Sorenson left because it was felt that his particular abilities and experience were not relevant to the project at that particular time.
Q89 Mr Khan: You had a project director without the skills to do the job.
Mr Nettel: We appointed Mr Sorenson anticipating in fact just the sorts of things we needed at the back end of the project when we were negotiating with our Campus partners within Paddington various land deals in order to make this scheme work. We anticipated that.
Q90 Mr Khan: He did not have the skills to do the job?
Mr Nettel: He did not have the skills to do the job at the time that he was appointed.
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4 Ev 31-32