As a result of this newspaper’s reporting about Rijkswaterstaat’s blunder during the renovation of the Afsluitdijk – the renovation will take three years longer and will cost hundreds of millions of euros more because Rijkswaterstaat overlooked water levels – CDA MP Harry van der Molen asks Tuesday. a plenary debate.
From documents that de Volkskrant obtained with a request under the Government Information (Public Access) Act (Wob) it appears that Rijkswaterstaat has clamped itself by openly taking the blame. At the same time, Rijkswaterstaat believes that the Levvel building consortium (BAM and Van Oord) is trying to save money from the mea culpa by attributing all the additional work to the dyke to that one mistake and by adopting an adamant attitude.
Van der Molen speaks of a ‘worrying pattern’ in major infrastructural works: the government as the client makes mistakes, construction companies ‘gamble on reimbursing additional costs’ in order to ‘get things done financially’.
Dispute procedure not started
The MP has another concern. The role of the House of Representatives as controller is affected because the ministry withholds information or shares information much too late. ‘Even worse: the Chamber is being misled.’ He refers to the letter to the Lower House of the then minister Cora van Nieuwenhuizen. She wrote in May 2021 that a dispute procedure would put an end to the haggling between the government and the builders about the additional costs.
But that dispute procedure, it now appears, has not started at all. The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management defends itself by saying that Van Nieuwenhuizen did not say in the letter when the proceedings would begin. That reading is inconsistent with correspondence in the possession of de Volkskrant† This shows that, at the insistence of a senior official, the phrase ‘we are preparing for’ in the letter to parliament was changed to ‘we are starting a dispute procedure’.
CDA MP Van der Molen: ‘We as MPs then think: work is being done. But now it turns out that nothing happened at all.’ Next Monday, the House will receive a letter from the current minister Mark Harbers in which text and explanation is given.
D66 MP Lisa van Ginneken endorses the concerns of the CDA. ‘Our monitoring task becomes very difficult if a ministry withholds information.’ Van Ginneken is waiting for Harbers’ letter from next Monday, but is already saying that the minister must also be open about training the provision of information to the press. ‘It really gives me a stomach ache. The press must also be able to control.’
Van Ginneken says about the debacle of the renovation of the Afsluitdijk: ‘It is possible to make mistakes, but if the loss of knowledge at Rijkswaterstaat results in this happening again and again, then that is the big risk.’ About the many hundreds of millions that the work will cost more: ‘These are mistakes that really hurt.’ The VVD declined to comment.
Criticism Court of Auditors
This week, the Court of Audit was also extremely critical of (tenders by) Rijkswaterstaat. Projects are started for which there is not enough budget in advance, and the planning is left to external parties. Moreover, if everything gets out of hand, accountability and an analysis of setbacks are often not forthcoming. ‘What does the minister learn from this? We assess these shortcomings as a risk to the financial management of infrastructure projects.’
According to professor of constitutional law Wim Voermans, it is legally possible to call a former minister to account or even prosecute for ‘deliberately’ misinforming the House of Representatives. “It just never happens. How are you now? The successor is held accountable. Often it ends in: mistake, thank you. Or everything is postponed, there might be a parliamentary inquiry, lessons learned and so on, but at the end nobody knows who actually committed the blunder.’