Stepping back in time

One of his central points is to liken the travails of contractor Multiplex on the job to the then Laing Construction at the Millennium Stadium. This will be the venue of this year's FA Cup if the construction team does not deliver to its Spring deadline for completion in north London. The presence of rival contractor Bovis Lend Lease, which bid for both stadia schemes but exited with mutterings over how unrealistic the price was, looms large over both projects, as Box points out.

It's interesting though to compare the two schemes. Scratch the surface and there are differences. There's the price of the Welsh job, £150m if you include Laing's loss, which is less than half that of Wembley even taking account of inflation. The Millennium Stadium was completed in two years, on time. Multiplex has missed the initial New Year deadline for Wembley and is in grave danger of failing to meet the spring one. And despite the major £26m loss it racked up, Laing did not end up in court over the Cardiff job, as Multiplex will in April.

Laing knuckled down and hit its 1999 deadline, despite the continual ‘will they won't they' speculation in the run up to the rugby world cup of that year. History may well be much more forgiving of Laing than of Multiplex. Wembley might be a spectacular product but it hardly shows an industry that has moved on much since the turn of last century.

The level of client confusion to begin with, the botched bidding process and the major dispute that had dogged the project are just what the industry is claiming it is trying to move away from. If anything the Wembley story shows we have moved back, not forward.