26. Given that the Department and Transport for London are responsible for establishing the governance arrangements for the programme, and Crossrail Limited responsible for delivery, we pressed the Department and Crossrail Limited on who should be held responsible for the delays and cost overruns on the programme. They were unwilling to pin-point responsibility to a single individual or entity. Crossrail Limited asserted that it was unlikely that one person could be held ultimately responsible because it was a complex situation and the Crossrail programme was the single biggest railway project in the UK. The Department argued that the governance arrangements did not allow an individual to be pin-pointed as responsible, and that it was important not to over-simplify a complex set of factors that contributed to problems with the programme. We heard repeatedly that this was a 'system failure'.42 The Department summarised this as Crossrail Limited failing to identify systemic risk, Crossrail Limited's Board not challenging Crossrail's executive team and the reporting of progress, and the Department failing to properly challenge the information that Crossrail Limited was reporting to it.43
27. The Department told us that the amounts paid to former senior members of the Crossrail Limited Board were higher than those for the Chief Executives of the Department's arm's-length bodies and that the Department had senior executives doing equally challenging roles elsewhere for less. For example, the remuneration of the former Chief Executive of Crossrail Limited over the two year period between 1 April 2016 and 31 March 2018 was approximately £1.7 million. The Department told us that it was not directly involved in setting remuneration packages for senior Crossrail Limited executives and acknowledged that there had been insufficient challenge in setting these.44
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42 Qq 3, 5, 7, 11, 22, 23, 31, 33, 35, 38, 39
43 Q 34
44 Qq 128, 129-131; C&AG's Report, page 19