The DeLank Cornish granite Diana Memorial in Hyde Park hit the headlines again last month (March) as it came in for more criticism, this time from MPs on the House of Commons' Public Accounts Committee. Their report resulted in renewed criticism in the press and once again S McConnell & Sons, the Northern Ireland company that used ground-breaking technology to shape the granite sections of the memorial, started receiving calls from the press for their comments.

Norman McKibbin, managing director of McConnells, told NSS: "The stone was produced on time and to budget. That gets lost. It's as if the stone held the project up and was the problem. And it wasn't. But nobody really wants to know the truth. It's starting to have an adverse effect on our business. People think there's got to be fire where there's smoke. But we worked to the programme we were given and the problems were absolutely nothing to do with the stone."

The complaint of the Public Accounts Committee was that with all the closures and extra work carried out since the memorial opened in July 2004 (see NSS July 2004) the project has come out at £2.2million over its original £3million budget and has left Royal Parks with an annual £250,000 maintenance bill - twice as much as expected.

Contributing to the problems was the unexpected popularity of the water feature, which left the grassed area around the stone memorial as what has been described as "a muddy bog" and the memorial itself looking like "an open drain". There was also the problem shortly after it opened of a freak storm blowing the leaves off the trees in July and clogging pumps. Then a child bumped his head when he fell over in the water and the memorial closed again.

When Gufstafson Porter designed the memorial they wanted people to interact with it as an expression of Princess Diana being a 'princess of the people'. But they expected people to treat it as a memorial and behave respectfully, not for coachloads of children to turn up in their swimming trunks.