An interesting letter appeared in The Scotsman on 27th October:-
"Martin Hannan’s article (News, October 25) asks many of the right questions which appear to have been ignored, or misinterpreted, by Edinburgh City Council in their headlong rush to launch the trams project.
However, he appears to ignore the overall responsibility of the Scottish Government for the £500 million of public money which has been squandered on this project.
Why did Transport Scotland continue to release money for a project that was being constantly reduced in size and only suddenly come to life when the decision was taken by the council not to waste any more money and stop the project at Haymarket?
This meant Edinburgh City Council had then to embark on its open-ended development of the line to St Andrew Square where no final figure for cost has been agreed.
This leaves the council in an impossible position as it has no idea of the final bill.
Why also has Audit Scotland happily gone along with the project when it should have been insisting that ministers stop the haemorrhaging of public money?
Audit Scotland and Transport Scotland bear a heavy responsibility for the waste of public money on this scheme."
The writer does clearly focus in on the weak position that the Scottish Government will have now to defend in any Public Inquiry. There were many opportunities to bring this project to a halt early on - well before Edinburgh and Scotland generally were saddled with enormous debts. It certainly does not bode well for the functions of a Scottish Government should a greater degree of independence be achieved.
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Resonsibility for the tram
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Edinburgh Trams - Fiscal Responsibility and National Reputation
The comments by d2tod4 do very much highlight the sucession of abject failures in financing public projects in Scotland over recent years. While other nations seem to have the ability to bring in major projects "under budget and ahead of schedule" we in Scotland seem incapable in the public sector to perform to the same level of competence. We have seemingly innumerable examples - the Scottish Parliament building and the Edinburgh trams project are two of the most high profile examples, but there are many more.
Why are our public sector professionals at national and local level so inept? Is it all a political game whereby projects are underestimated in order to deceive the other parties and the electorate? Or is it simply a demonstration of woeful incompetence? For the sake of Scotland let us hope that it is the former. It is high time we started showing the world that the past high reputation of Scottish professional engineers and government administrators has not been lost for ever.
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Public money = easy money?
I don't think it's limited to just incompetence by our project managers. You can see the mismanagement all over, from the politicians' expenses scandal to Edinburgh City council repair fraud. The recession may be causing the culture of easy public money to shift, but as an emergency stop is applied on public spending, the gravy train goes on for those projects that are "too big to fail". No wonder people are camping out around the world to demand that governments get their priorities right.
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Handing over in excess of £400M without any sign of a check on progress, or so much as a written receipt is mind boggling.
John Swinney has recently said 'I was misled by tie'... or words to that effect, as if he was a hapless pensioner deceived by a nasty and devious door-to-door tarmac gang....(come to think of it.....!) and not a Minister of State, the Finance Minister, with all the resources, advice available, and supposedly experience and nous that such a title indicates.
THis remains a desperate project for it's creating, nor reducing, pollution, being reduced to a pitiful fragment of the original system ----- yet for a final cost (including interest and repayments of new loans) over double that of the original envisaged total system.
But just as one shouldn't get away with any crime simply because it is an unprecedentedly serious example of it's type, then neither should Government, Councillors, Council executives, or people within the failed tie company get away without the long overdue scrutiny a only a Judical Public Enquiry will provide.