The £100m construction contract with Bouygues remains unsigned because significant impediments remain and TfL’s funding agreement precludes signing the contract until key things have been achieved, including securing capital funding. In October the Garden Bridge Trust (GBT) told Lambeth that the contract needed to be signed off 'within a few weeks' or else they would have to re-run the tendering process. Two months later they have neither signed nor re-run the competition for the contract. The GBT have yet to even agree details for a variation of the lease from Lambeth Council (freeholder) and a sub-lease of the land for the bridge and Coin Street Community Builders (leaseholders). If this happens, then there should be a 6 month delay since the site was recently designated as an Asset of Community Value which requires Lambeth to give a community interest group up to 6 months to come with an alternative offer for the site. Meanwhile 46 planning conditions were imposed by Lambeth, including some that involve adjoining landowners ITV and IBM regarding the use of access on their land, and noise and vibration issues. Again, this was scheduled to be resolved by Oct 2015 - but the GBT are late - again. Last June, Boris Johnson agreed to provide a guarantee for the £3.5m maintenance costs but as a result of Michael Ball’s judicial review, TfL must reveal the contents of any guarantee to Michael, which has not happened yet. Lambeth have confirmed that they have not received the Operations and Maintenance Business Plan which would include this 'guarantee' issue; this is a pre-commencement condition so no construction can begin without it. Although £20m of public funding has already been given to the GBT (and around £9m spent) the bulk of the money will not be released until all of the issues above are resolved. There is considerable uncertainty as to whether the money will be granted with the new mayor, as one of the mayoral candidates has put down a motion to the London Assembly demanding all public funding be withdrawn, and clearly the rows over its controversial procurement will make this more likely. We have big doubts about their fundraising claims: Glencore is one of their biggest donors and they are close to bankruptcy. With recent negative publicity, the GBT have been desperate to announce new money but the best they could manage, was a mere £5m from Sky a couple of weeks ago - and it quickly became clear this had been previously included in the total of £85m of private donations (they are still £30m short). Without evidence of all of the funding in place, the remaining £40m of public funding will not be released, according to TfL's funding agreement. In conclusion, it's pretty obvious they are not going to be in any position to begin construction in the summer and if they aren't, they will almost certainly run into logistical problems with the construction of the Thames Tideway Tunnel. They always argued that this would force a 5 year delay, which would kill the project. But most engineering and logistic problems are resolvable including this one, but the issue by then, will be the considerable additional costs. Please share the petition to stop the Garden Bridge and support us in our legal challenge www.everyclick.com/tcos contact us: thamescentralopenspace@gmail.com