A COUNCIL has spent £3.6m on designs for an iconic road bridge that were too expensive to implement.

Labour-run Sunderland City Council wants to tackle congestion and improve access to the city centre with a new River Wear crossing between Pallion and Castletown.

It had hoped to utilise architect Stephen Spence’s artistic design that included two pointy cable stay towers of 180m and 140m height, that curved and tapered without any fixed connection.

The design was praised in some quarters but it was also criticized for being impractical.

After two of the four bidders for the construction contract dropped out earlier this year, the council had to drop the design because it could not be built for the £120m that had been budgeted for the scheme.

It emerged in response to a question posed at a recent council meeting, that the authority spent £200,000 on management of the project and £3.4m on the original design.

That money came in the form of grants from the Department of Transport’s local transport plan yearly allocation and the now-defunct regional development agency ONE NorthEast.

The council is hoping to proceed with a simpler design that can be built within budget.

The council had no-one available for comment but the leader of the Conservative group, Robert Oliver, said he and his colleagues fully supported the project’s completion.

He said: “It is a very large amount of money that has been lost on the iconic part of the design, which is very unfortunate, and I can understand why people would be concerned about it.

“But it has happened, and now the best thing to do is to move on with the project and ensure that it is completed to safeguard the rest of the spent so far.”

Coun Oliver said that although the initial proposals would have been the “icing on the cake”, the most important consideration was making a new link between the A19 trunk road and the city’s ports.

Independent councillor Colin Wakefield said: “I think the money could be much better spent in Sunderland on jobs.”