It is evident that they do proceed with paying design fees prior to having the finance in place. I think it is also fairly common practice as finance would be very much given based on the proposed end product. What gets me is that fifty five million is not reasonable to expend when the works are no where near proceeding. The designers and the soil investigation teams, transport consultants and all the rest have done their work upto a planning application stage from what can be gathered the first being based on a eighty million pound project cost then this goes upto one ninety million pounds and finally to three hundred million pounds. If we have three complete ready to build designs complete and fully prepared ready to build then maybe acceptable but have we got this or have we just got outline designs to satisfy planning. To me the amounts paid out would suggest that the person charged with overseeing the development of the stadium for the club is either corrupt or indeed incompetent and quiet possibly both.
Put it simply HKS claim to have a team of 50 to 60 Engineers working on designs in both UK and US. Let me just assume they have and let me just assume that all off them cost HKS one hundred thousand pounds a head a year. (generous i would suggest.) so 60 x 100,000 = 6,000,000.00 per year. I know the design has dragged on and i know the company has to make money but are we really to believe that 60 designers have worked on this outline design for ten years or its equivalent or assuming they works 40 hours a week each that equates to (40 x 60 x 52 x 10 = 1,248,000 man hours) How many drawings we got again. I would hazard a guess we wont have that many mahours needed to build the thing. The Whole thing stinks. Rightly it has been pointed out that design fees are considerable but i would suggest 10% to 15 % be reasonable paid not just for intial design but for its supervision and completion. This would cover all disciplines. For outline design for to planning stage i think it would be reasonable to expect 25-30% of the total design fees to be paid. In my book that should mean
First design 80,000,000 x 15% = 12,000,000 say 30% would be 3.6 million
Fist H&G Design 190,000,000 x 15% = 28,500,000 say 30% would be 8.5 million
Second H&G Design 300,000,000 x 15% = 45,000,000 say 30% would be 13.5 million
This assumes H&G Design was completed to a reasonable level before they changed their minds again. I have my doubts reading the overview. So maximum in my view should be around 26 million. I suppose there may be other costs such as planning application oh and the rental of Stanley Park for no reason whatsoever.