Two days ago, John Knox wrote a piece arguing that the troubled Edinburgh trams project ought to continue, and making reference to John Carson, who will be standing for election to the Edinburgh council later this summer. Mr Carson now offers his response.While Mr Knox is of course entitled to his views on the Edinburgh trams, some of his assumptions and assertions about my campaign for a seat on City of Edinburgh Council (CEC) require to be corrected. Mr Knox mentions my previous employment at Network Rail. I was initially their director of regulation and business planning and latterly director of maintenance, a record of which I am proud and which has given me a unique insight into the practicalities and complexities of major projects. He is right that I have no objection to trams in principle. My objection has been the incompetent way in which the Edinburgh project has been conducted, which prompted me to observe three years ago that the £545 million project would end up costing over £1 billion and be years over deadline. I don't claim this as a great feat of prophecy. Any councillor who had read the briefing note produced by Transport Initiatives Edinburgh (tie) on the signing of the infrastructure contract could have reached the same conclusion. The note clearly stated that there was a "variation clause" in the contract to cover changes in design, sequence and ground conditions. But the document also said that 100 per cent of the risk had been sold to the contractor and that 95 per cent of the price was fixed. In these glaringly contradictory terms lie the seeds of the current disaster. The fact that Transport Scotland approved a project built on this contractual absurdity says much about their competence as financial managers of the grant to the project. Mr Knox is right to suspect that SNP does not want to stop the trams, for all that party's strenuous positioning on the issue. The nationalists have had many opportunities to pull the plug, since voting to approve the botched contracts that have put CEC on the road to ruin. The SNP deputy leader in Edinburgh, councillor Steve Cardownie, appears to have been too addicted to the benefits of office to have done more than bluster. As to the sums involved, even the enormous figures that Mr Knox throws around in such cavalier fashion are conjectural. It is impossible to get a straight answer from CEC. Truth has been in scarce supply over the years of tie's mismanagement. The sums Mr Knox mentions are grossly ill-defined. What does all this expenditure represent? Is it money spent to date and/or committed? Does it or should it include the further sums proffered by Mr Knox due to be claimed by the contractors? This week we are told by veteran Liberal Democrat ex-MP John Barrett that the utilities cost is to rise to over £100m – a two-and-a-half time increase – but is this included? Mr Knox's assumptions on how much more will be needed to complete the project are equally vague. He seems to rely on what "councillors have been assured" to make his points. He forgets that, until very recently, the people making the assurances were mendaciously briefing that the project was "on time and on budget", and that the 800 or so claims submitted by the contractors were merely a symptom of their delinquency. I can assure Mr Knox that the contractors have given fixed prices to exit the project and to build to Haymarket, but insurmountable problems with fibre optic cables that could take a further 18 months of closures stops them doing so for St Andrew Square. On the basis of a reported cost of £700m to build the tramline from the airport to St Andrew Square, the cost per metre of the project will have increased by an order of five since 2003. tie planned lines that extended to Newbridge with a loop to Granton. To claim, as Mr Knox does, that the project is short of only £200m to “complete” demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the issues involved. There have been successful UK tram systems where the risk was sold down to PFI (private finance initiative) owner-operators. Mr Knox fails to mention Sheffield, where their trams system was sold to Stagecoach for £1. Suffice to say these UK projects were all better run than tie's has been. In their conceit, tie decided that they were best placed to take this risk, a decision for which Edinburgh has paid dearly. The much-hyped 30 June meeting has already been considerably undermined by the press – and, with no substantive figures likely to be produced, any report will result yet again in a delayed decision. The current Lib Dem administration is borrowed to the hilt, with no surpluses and a likelihood of large ongoing subsidies required if the line is built to St Andrew Square, funding the excess is proving impossible. Mr Knox should also know that a low growth, delayed development scenario (less severe than current recession) in the final business case (section 9.101) forecast ongoing losses on a combined bus and tram operation growing to £60m by 2031. It is important to stress that the role of the SNP government in this farce has not been totally flushed out. Their grant of £500m was based on rules set by government "delivery" arm Transport Scotland, which should have guaranteed that public money would only be spent on defined and demonstrable achievements of project milestones. Clearly this has not been done. It was Transport Scotland which was also responsible to finance secretary, John Swinney, for approving such fundamentally flawed construction contracts. The elephant in the room is the reluctance of the SNP government to rule on the concessionary fare issue as, without this major concession, trams are doomed. My manifesto for election to CEC will make a case for the project to be stopped and the existing works mothballed. This will allow decision-makers to take stock, and get rid of tie and the current contractors. If there is to be "a fairly easy choice" on spending in excess £200m, let it be used to offset the £247m of cuts between 2009 and 2019 planned by this current administration and maintain standards in our nurseries, day centres, schools, sport facilities and refuse collections. In a difficult economic climate, it would be good management for the council to determine local priorities and protect them against the ravages of budget cuts, not jeopardise them further by the commitment of unquantified money to deliver a piece of non-viable tramline.
Donate to us: support independent, intelligent, in-depth Scottish journalism from just 3p a day
Related posts: