How ‘shroud of secrecy’ hid true cost of £1billion trams debacle
‘Not going to give you information’
A ‘SHROUD of secrecy’ obscured the true cost of the Edinburgh tram project at the height of the construction fiasco, the former council leader said yesterday.
Jenny Dawe, city council leader from 2007 to 2012, gave the first day of the Edinburgh Tram Inquiry damning evidence of the local authority’s handling of the affair.
In 2002, the City of Edinburgh Council set up an arm’s-length company called Transport Initiatives Edinburgh (TIE) to manage large-scale projects including the trams, originally meant to cost £375million.
Construction began in 2007 with the aim of finishing in 2011 but the scheme was hit by delays, spiralling costs and a feud between TIE and construction contractors.
In the end the project was completed three years late in 2014 and cost £1billion, despite the section of the route from the city centre to Newhaven being cancelled.
The trams project has since gone down as one of the most embarrassing episodes in local government history, triggering the inquiry which began hearing evidence yesterday.
As the first witness yesterday, retired Liberal Democrat politician Mrs Dawe was asked by senior counsel Jonathan Lake, QC, if she had been frustrated that TIE kept certain matters confidential without telling councillors.
She admitted there had been a ‘shroud of secrecy’ around the cost of the project during her tenure, as relations between various sides in the construction pact soured, but said councillors still felt that they had enough information to proceed with the project. Mrs Dawe added: ‘In looking at the documents for this inquiry I have of course found that there were internal highly confidential memos going around which did suggest that councillors were perhaps being kept in the dark.’
In particular, secrecy surrounded ‘the details of disputes and the precise amount of money that was likely to be required’. During the dispute between TIE and the construction consortium ‘the implication was, “you can’t be trusted not to tell the consortium what we, TIE, are thinking, so we’re not going to give you information”.
‘I was put in the situation where I was having to talk to quite a lot of people and to the media and basically I was not able to answer a lot of the questions they had about cost and time because I didn’t know.’
Mrs Dawe told also how information was withheld from those councillors who opposed the project: ‘There was a bit of a difficulty in the coalition administration which comprised two parties – one anti-tram, one pro-tram... the information might not be provided as early to the anti-tram.’
She admitted this had been to withhold information from the public in the early stages of the project, when the SNP faction opposed the trams. She said: ‘We knew there had been information getting into the press which was unhelpful and we believed that source to be coming from the antitram group on the council.’
Mrs Dawe also recounted the particularly disruptive period in February 2009 when workers downed tools on Princes Street as a result of a pay dispute.
She called the episode ‘extremely disappointing’ and recounted how Transport Scotland, which put £500million into the project, criticised the failing council initiative at the time. The inquiry has so far reviewed six million documents in the run-up to witness evidence sessions, which are due to continue today and tomorrow.