Crossrail cost to complete: Cost and commercial management
Summary
In August 2018, Crossrail Ltd (CRL) announced that the programme to open the Elizabeth line would not be delivered on the original estimated timeline and that the opening of the Central Operating Section (COS) by December 2018 was not achievable. It was also made public that the original estimated budget would be insufficient and that additional funding was required to complete the programme. In late 2018, the Department for Transport announced that the central section funding would be increased to £14.9bn, a £2.15bn increase on the previous limit of funding, enabling the programme to continue with the works.
The delays led to the need to develop a new delivery strategy that could take the programme to completion. In the first half of 2019, after several months of intense planning, Crossrail announced a revised opening window reflecting the Earliest Opening Programme (EOP). The plan was to bring the central section of the line into Revenue Service as early as possible between December 2020 and March 2021, opening all stations except Whitechapel and Bond Street, which would not be complete by this date. This strategy introduced the concept of staged configurations to allow progressive completion of key testing activities. A bottom-up schedule was developed to reflect this logic called the Delivery Control Schedule (DCS 1.0).