Q111 Mr Curry: And two months later you pulled the plug on this, did you not?
Mr Bell: I certainly would not sign off on the outline business case.
Q112 Mr Curry: In other words you pulled the plug. Using political epigrams, that is right. So you took one look at this and went into meltdown did you not?
Mr Bell: Well it certainly looked like a project in very serious trouble.
Q113 Mr Curry: What was your reaction? You came. We had this slightly surrealistic scheme where we had the regional office of the NHS bothered about it pretty well from the beginning, according to the National Audit Office Report the Government and the Department of Health did not regard it as being any sort of flagship scheme at all, it kept adding new sorts of bits and pieces as it went along, the land was not available and you suddenly came and found everyone was gaily carrying on with this here scheme. What did you say to yourself when you went home? On your first night home, having looked at these accounts, what did you say to your shaving mirror?
Mr Bell: It is not what I said to myself, it is what I shared with my colleagues.
Q114 Mr Curry: Could you share it with us? It would be very helpful.
Mr Bell: I basically wanted to get down to understand all the details that constituted this scheme as envisaged at the time and sort of participated in a process of getting under the skin of understanding all the issues.
Q115 Mr Curry: When you looked at it, what did you think was right about this scheme?
Mr Bell: I thought that the vision was right.
Q116 Mr Curry: Visions usually are, are they not?
Mr Bell: It was a very bold vision, a very appropriate vision. What was right about the scheme was definitely that our hospitals, both the Brompton and Harefield as well as St Mary's, are in dire need of replacement and renewal and this scheme provided an opportunity for the renewal of much needed hospitals.
Q117 Mr Curry: The problem with vision is that it then has to be translated into something people can visit, get bandages put on and elastoplasts and all this, have health duties performed there. What went wrong then in your view? Did it go wrong from the very start or was there some point at which you said to yourself, this was where it went off the rails and nobody picked it up in time?
Mr Bell: From my examination of the record, historically as well as what I was able to come to a conclusion at in the period of April and May 2005, the key fundamental that was missing was that there was no land and without land it is very difficult to translate the vision into something concrete.
Q118 Mr Curry: I do not wish to sound terribly naїve about this, but those of us who are laymen, neither accountants nor engineers, normally think when you plan to build something, you have something to build it on. Is that a sort of curious notion?
Mr Bell: No, it is not curious at all.
Q119 Mr Curry: The fact that you did not have anything to build it on might be regarded from the start as being a weakness, if not more than that.
Mr Bell: Well, as I said to you, it was a vision.
Q120 Mr Curry: Visions usually turn out to be very expensive I find in this Committee I have to say. Let us just look at this. If you look at this map in the middle about the site, it is wonderful. This hospital has migrated the entire way across whatever this bit of Paddington is called, has it not? It all started on the south bank, giving it an air of romance no doubt, then it migrated to the north of Paddington and the whole lot is pretty well north of the Paddington basin by the time you have finished. It has been a wonderful process.
Mr Bell: That is what planning is about.