3.5 Crossrail Ltd started to produce a detailed, realistic, bottom-up plan in late 2018, setting out a logical sequence of activities, interdependencies and schedule risks covering all remaining activities. In April 2019 Crossrail Ltd announced that it had produced a new plan for the introduction of new services on the central section, although it is still unclear when a full 24 trains an hour service between Heathrow and Reading in the West and Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east will commence. It is important to have an agreed plan that sponsors and contractors are signed up to because:
• without a plan, Crossrail Ltd could not make important decisions such as when the railway will open;
• given the close relationship between cost and schedule, there remains uncertainty about the cost of the programme and the risk that the costs will increase above the current £17.6 billion of available funding;
• until there was an agreed plan, Crossrail Ltd could not reset contracts with its contractors, nor was it able to sequence activities across contracts, which means that it could not effectively monitor the risks to delivery across the programme; and
• without the plan, the Crossrail Ltd board, and sponsors, could not monitor progress on the programme, nor could they hold Crossrail Ltd to account.
3.6 In April 2019, based on its revised plan, Crossrail Ltd announced that it will introduce 12 peak-time services an hour on the central section between Paddington and Abbey Wood at some point between October 2020 and March 2021. These services will not initially stop at Bond Street because the work on that station is significantly delayed.
3.7 Crossrail Ltd intends to align its revised programme plan with the individual contract plans that each main contractor has produced. It also intends to have its programme plan independently assured.