sen8or:

 

My view is that where there is wastage in one Govt sector when it comes to construction, it wouldn't shock me if there were more

 

I appreciate that the build at a hospital will have far more technical requirements than many other projects, but, these would all have been known at the outset yet costs increased more than $1bio? That just reeks of either inadequate initial scoping (or incompetent / deceptive) or massive project creep.

 

I haven't really seen significantly more or less waste in government construction than commercial construction. The buildings are typically better built but the big difference is the use of the buildings. Commercial buildings are typically much simpler than something like a hospital so much easier to control.

The worst project I've ever done for scope and program creep was a private job by a major New Zealand corporate. It was years late and costs 10s of millions of dollars extra on a more limited project than a hospital. The construction process is pretty broken, especially as buildings become considerably more complex.

The one comment I would make about the feature or technology in buildings is it is usually very poorly understood by the people building them. Sometimes it's unnecessary, sometimes the technology is used as it provides a benefit that you don't understand as you've moved on to the next job and don't see how the building is used or never really get to understand. Only around 30% of the costs of a building are construction, around 70% of the costs of the building are operational.

One example is when we built a forensic psych unit. It was built as a 1 1/2 floor building with a full mezzanine above the patient rooms. A number of the trades on the job were ranting about the extra cost. It was done that way because the people to be housed in that unit were really disturbed and in many cases dangerous.

Having the mezzanine allowed the building to be largely maintained while not disturbing the patients or exposing the technical staff to significant risks. The alternative was having to decant patients into different parts of the building or temporarily move them elsewhere, which had a whole range of costs associated with it as well as being better for patients and much much safer for staff.

That's not to say there isn't waste, poor decisions or crap QS/project management. There is but not in a way that I've seen to be significantly worse than the private sector.