Two years before Diana memorial is built

The Government has been forced to admit that its pledge to have the Diana Memorial Fountain completed by next August was too optimistic - and has moved its official deadline back by a year to 2004.

This latest delay to the longdelayed scheme to give the "People's Princess" a permanent London memorial came after the Evening Standard challenged the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's insistence that the highly technical "water feature", approved yesterday, would be completed by 31 August 2003, the sixth anniversary of her death.

A Culture Department spokesman said: "There has been a change of position. The fountain will now be complete by the summer of 2004." Government sources stressed that "substantial" progress towards the water feature's completion is expected by August 2003. They said there was no intention of putting it back again.

Earlier this month the department said Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell's deadline for completion of the £3million project - which is being funded by proceeds of Diana commemorative coins - would be "within a year" of the winning design being chosen.

However, the design by American Kathryn Gustafson, 47, in partnership with English architect Neil Porter, 43, is far too complex to be completed within 12 months. Mr Porter said last night: "I'd like to think we can sit down with the Fountain Committee and Royal Parks Agency and put forward a programme that makes sense."

Last night a source close to the selection committee - headed by the Princess's close friend Rosa Monckton - said a clear sense of when the fountain might be completed will only come after that meeting. The "moat-without-a-castle" design unveiled yesterday is, Mr Porter said, "just beyond concept stage - so it requires a development period". Work will not begin until the proposal has been fully developed and approved by Chancellor Gordon Brown. The Gustafson Porter design proposal will require considerable technological input. The two separate, but converging, arcs of water - both at different speeds and different gradients and following the natural contours of the Hyde Park site - will present a complex engineering proposition.

Mr Porter said: "It could well be that we need to make smallscale prototypes."

A source at the Culture Department said of the new delay: "We need a deadline because we know from bitter experience that if you don't set them projects can go on indefinitely. We would like to see the fountain ready as soon as possible but that said we have to be realistic - and the last thing we want is something done in a hurry that isn't all it should be."

As well as the challenging technical specifications of the memorial "water-feature", the design requires the planting of grasses and trees, which will need a lengthy period to establish themselves.

The fountain idea was first suggested in August 1999 and agreed by the Diana Memorial Committee in January 2000. Last February the committee admitted it had yet to choose the site and a new Fountain Design Committee was appointed. In June that year Gordon Brown revealed the fountain was to be sited by The Serpentine in Hyde Park with a completion date of "by 2003". On 1 July this year Ms Jowell set the sixth anniversary (August 2003) as the new completion date and "carpets" officials for delays. Today the Culture Department extended that deadline to the seventh anniversary of Diana's death.