Garden bridge charity delays publishing annual accounts for five months

The charity behind London’s proposed garden bridge has delayed publishing its full accounts for five months, adding to concerns that the financing of the project could be in trouble.

The Garden Bridge Trust, which aims to begin work later this year on the 367-metre tree and plant-filled structure across the Thames, said the delay in filing accounts to Companies House and the Charities Commission was simply an administrative matter.

As reports circulate that support for the £175m scheme is fading in government, and with the trust still waiting to hear if they will receive a funding guarantee from ministers, critics said they feared there was more to it.

The accounts had been expected by the end of this month and were likely to shed some light on the project’s spending activities. In May the newly elected mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said the trust had already spent £37.7m of the £60m in public funding given to the project before any construction had even begun.

There have also been questions about the extent of private donations to the trust, which says it still has to raise £30m of the £115m in private money needed, with some sizeable contributions remaining anonymous.

“I suspect that the Garden Bridge Trust is using administrative tidiness as a desperate excuse to postpone publishing their accounts,” said Caroline Pidgeon, who leads the Liberal Democrats in the Greater London assembly.

“It reeks of convenience to delay publishing their accounts just when there are so many questions they need to answer about how much they have really raised from private donors, and also how they have already managed to spend so much of taxpayers’ money.”

The trust said it originally ended its trading year in October, the anniversary of its formation, with accounts filed in July. It was now moving to a more standard year-end of 31 March, to match the financial year, and would thus prepare 17 months of accounts rather than 12. These would be filed to Companies House by 31 December and the Charities Commission a month later.

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A spokeswoman for the trust said: “We don’t have anything to hide – this is a decision taken for administrative reasons.” It was, she added, “sensible” to align its dates with the financial calendar.

Earlier this week BBC’s Newsnight reported that the Thomas Heatherwick-designed project could be in jeopardy under the new government of Theresa May, which no longer featured George Osborne, a key supporter of the bridge.

Khan is notably more sceptical about the bridge, which is to run from South Bank to Temple and feature 270 trees and thousands of plants, than Boris Johnson, his predecessor. Earlier this month Khan blocked some funding for part of the work pending a review.

While proponents say the structure will be a tourist draw and economic boon that will provide a much-needed pedestrian link, critics say it is a vastly expensive vanity project on a stretch of the Thames already well served by bridges, and is likely to need ongoing public subsidies.

The trust is waiting to hear whether the Department for Transport (DfT), which provided £30m of the £60m in public money, will extend an additional £15m in underwriting against the project failing, into 2017. This is seen as crucial for its viability.

News on this had been expected this week, but has not materialised. The start of construction work has been put back from this summer until the autumn.

A DfT spokeswoman would not give any details for when the decision might come. She said: “The trustees of the garden bridge have asked for an extension to the financial support the government is providing to the project. Ministers are considering the request.”