There's an old joke about Europe that goes something like this: In Heaven, the police are British, the cooks are French, the lovers are Italian, the engineers are German and it’s all organised by the Swiss. In Hell, however, the police are German, the lovers are Swiss, the cooks are British, the police are German and it’s all organised by the Italians.
Of late, the Germans have been doing their best to challenge how others see them, but not in a good way. When it comes to major public sector building projects, Germany is proving anything but a model of teutonic efficiency.
According to Spiegel Online “Stuttgart's train station, Hamburg's concert house and Berlin's airport… are currently competing to be seen as the country's most disastrous.” The airport and train station development are costing billions more than expected, but the real shocker is the concert hall – which should have cost €187 million, but now has a price tag of €865 million.
Normally, when this sort of thing happens, those responsible go to ground. However, Der Spiegel persuaded the chief architects of each project – Christoph Ingenhoven, Meinhard von Gerkan and Pierre de Meuron – to come in for a joint interview. Naturally, they were keen to deflect the blame from themselves, but their answers revealed a lot about the way that project costs escalate.
The most fundamental problem is that the politicians and officials who commission major public works never spend enough time or money working out what they really want:
We’re familiar with this problem in Britain – especially when it comes to public sector IT projects. However, it’s not all down to clueless ministers and civil servants – the construction industry is all tto willing to exploit government incompetence:
These problems seem to be particularly bad in Germany:
The link between Germany’s inability to manage public sector projects and its wider role in Europe is an interesting one. If the German system can’t cope with the construction of a concert hall or a train station, then what hope is there for the construction of a fiscal union, on which the very survival of the Eurozone depends?