By John Knox
Is there anyone in Edinburgh – or anyone in Scotland – who seriously believes we should stop building the trams, after spending £440 million on them?
Apparently there is one such faintheart. John Carson, a Network Rail engineer, is staging what he says is his own “referendum” on the issue. He is standing as an anti-trams candidate in a council by-election in Edinburgh Central later this summer.
The SNP claims to the anti-trams party and Mr Carson, poor fellow, is likely to be washed away in the Braveheart tsunami currently sweeping the country. But even the SNP don’t really want to “stop the trams”, they just want a pause. So does Mr Carson, when it comes down to it.
In fact, when you look into John Carson’s manifesto, he complains more about the way the project has been managed – especially the secrecy surrounding it – than about the trams themselves. “The issue here,” he said in the Scotsman recently, “is simply one of trust. Given their track record, do the people of Edinburgh trust the current administration to complete any part of the project?”
Like the SNP, John Carson has simply lost his nerve. It’s a big, difficult project which has run into technical and managerial problems and now they want to cut and run halfway through. “What would £100m–£200m [the cost of continuing] buy the people of Edinburgh in these times of austerity?” he asks. The answer is: “Not as much as finishing the trams.”
To be fair to the SNP, they have been against the trams from the start – but, now that we are halfway through, in their hearts they realise there is no going back. It’s true, the finance secretary John Swinney has said “Not a penny more” than the £500m allocated by parliament will be forthcoming from the Scottish government. Yet he is prepared to have talks with Edinburgh council on how it might raise the expected £200m extra funds needed to complete the line from the airport to St Andrew Square.
Sometimes – in fact quite often – good money has to be thrown after bad, just to get the job done. Mr Carson should know this, having led the team which built the Skye bridge. That started off with a budget of £15m and ended up costing £25m. The Dublin trams – now a great success and being extended – were originally costed at 250 million euros, but the final cost was three times as high.
The A80 motorway upgrade has doubled its original budget to £320m. The M74 extension has risen in cost from £250m to nearly £700m. The Borders railway project, hardly begun, is already on a fast-track towards trebling its budget from the original £115m. And, of course, we won’t mention the Scottish parliament building.
By comparison, the Edinburgh trams project has been a minor offender in the sorry history of public sector overruns. Councillors, hopefully, will learn on 30 June how much the project is over budget – probably in the region of £200m, with just a third of the infrastructure work completed. This sounds worse than it is. Most of the tricky bits have been done: new bridges, the tram depot, the groundwork. Over £60m, for instance, was spent moving gas, water and electricity pipes along the route and much of this involved renewing pipework that would have needed renewal anyway.
No one quite knows how much it will cost to finish the whole of phase one – all the 23 stops from the airport to Newhaven – but even if it were double the original budget of £545m, this would a modest increase for a public sector project. But in the age of austerity even this is not a realistic option – though the Chamber of Commerce has just recently called for it.
Councillors have been assured that the business case still holds good with the line stopping, for the meantime, at St Andrew Square. Passenger numbers, a report in December estimated, will grow at 2 per cent a year and the trams will start to cover their running costs after the first year.
And let’s remind ourselves why we embarked on the trams in the first place: to provide Edinburgh with a modern eco-friendly transport system, save the city centre from decline and tackle traffic congestion. A report out just last week from the satnav manufacturer TomTom found that Edinburgh was Britain’s second most congested city, after London. The city-owned Lothian Buses are excellent, everyone agrees, but they are near capacity.
Where trams have been built in Britain recent years – Manchester and Nottingham spring to mind – they have proved successful and extensions are being planned. It is easy to extend a line once the basic system is in place. Hopefully, when the age of austerity is over, the tram lines can be extended to Granton in the north and the Royal Infirmary in the south.
In short, on 30 June councillors face a fairly easy choice. Complete the line to St Andrew Square at a cost of around £200m, or mothball it where it stands at a cost of around £100m in compensation to the contractors, Bilfinger Berger and Siemens.
These figures are guesses, of course – because, throughout the whole saga of the trams, the public has been shielded from the horror of it all by the council and the contractors. Like medieval priests, they have stood with their backs to us, bowing before the altar of commercial confidentiality.
Both parties have got away with years of ungentlemenly behaviour – blaming each other for faults, taking months to resolve disputes, complaining about the original contracts, hiding the figures from public view. The most recent disgraceful example was the six-month suspension of work while executives – the council-paid ones on more than £100,000 a year – sat round a negotiating table in various posh hotels sifting slowly through the paperwork.
The auditor general for Scotland politely asked, at one point, if the agency specifically set up to deal with large-scale public transport projects, Transport Scotland, could not have been brought in to check if these executives were still awake.
No wonder voters of Edinburgh – and taxpayers across the country – are prowling the wards like angry bears seeking whom they may devour. But after they have eaten the Liberal Democrat candidate in Edinburgh Central, they may pause to wonder if it’s wise to try to throw yourself in front of a tram just as it is about to open its doors and take you to a better place.
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