The complex and controversial £4.2bn Thames Tideway Tunnels project is “ on track absolutely and moving in the right direction” according to project chairman Sir Neville Simms in an interview with Infrastructure Intelligence editor Antony Oliver recorded at the recent ACE annual conference.

“It is a critical project for London and London is critical for the nation – it is the [economic] powerhouse,” he added pointing out that with 55M tonnes of sewage flushed into the River Thames last year, it was vital to press ahead rapidly.

"The model that is being used here tries to draw all the threads together and if it is successful it is going to be something that will be used elsewhere in the world.” Sir Neville Simms.

“We seem to get bogged down in affordability argument and what is affordable over 100 years,” he added. “But we do owe it to the next generation to provide, as the Victorians did for us, something for the future.”

Having launched invitations to tender for the three main tunnelling packages at the start of the year, Simms said that prices were now returning from the contracting consortia and would be all in and ready for assessment by September.

In preparation, Simms was assembling a team ready to take over an drive the project as soon as it was granted a license for the project by regulator Ofwat.

“The team is coming together very rapidly now but one must remember that this team is being built from within Thames Water,” he said. “It doesn’t become a separate company until the licence is granted and that won’t happen until the money and the construction contracts come together. We are aiming for May [2015] so we want to get everything done by the second quarter next year.”

Simms pointed out that alongside the technical and planning preparations for the project, he was also very busy preparing the ground to raise the required financing for the project. This he said represented a great opportunity to push the boundaries of modern project financing.

“I have been involved since the early days of PFI and I have watched it develop,” he explained. “The complication comes around how you match the needs of society, what the government wants to see happen, the fact that you have privatised a lot of industry and the fact that you have a regulator. The model that is being used here tries to draw all those threads together and if it is successful it is going to be something that will be used elsewhere in the world.”