No end to line as tram inquiry takes longer than construction work did
● Swift and thorough investigation promised by first minister six years ago
The public inquiry into Edinburgh’s troubled tram project has now lasted longer than the contractors took to build the line itself.
It is six years since Alex Salmond appointed former Lord Advocate Lord Hardie to head the investigation into what went wrong with the Scottish capital’s biggest infrastructure project for generations after costs soared and delays lengthened.
The-then first minister promised the inquiry would be “swift and thorough”.
But two years after public hearings concluded, it has still not published its report.
And that means the inquiry has now spent longer looking at the problems which blighted the project than it took from the start of construction work on the main contract in June 2008 to the opening of the line on 31 May 2014.
Council leader Adam Mcvey claimed the extension to Newhaven – due for completion in 2023 – could now be up and running before Lord Hardie’s report appeared. He said: “It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that we have passengers travelling on the tram extension before the inquiry reports.” The inquiry team has given no indication of when the report might be expected. Any individual or organisation who is to be singled out for criticism may need to be sent a letter warning them of the comments.
One insider said: “Andrew Hardie is one of the smartest legal brains in Scotland, so he will get to the nub of the issues. If folk have done things wrong, I don’t think he’ll miss them.
“The issue with the tram project isn’t that things went wrong – it’s that hardly anything went right. You can see with things like the Queensferry
Crossing and the Sick Kids that major projects have problems because they’re major projects – they’re big and complicated. What made the tram different was just the scale and the number of things that went wrong.” Opponents said the extension to Newhaven should not have proceeded before the inquiry’s recommendations were known, but the council claimed lessons had been learned already.
Cllr Mcvey said: “While we want the conclusions and we want to see if there’s anything else to be taken on board, this does just illustrate how much time and progress we would have lost if we had followed the advice of the nay-sayers.
“While there will be takeaways from the inquiry, the current tram team have already done a brilliant job in not doing what the previous tram project did.”
The plan to bring trams back to Edinburgh was going to cost £375 million when the Scottish Governmentannouncedfunding in 2003 – and they were going to be running by 2009.
But the cost quickly escalated and finally reached £776m, which can be rounded up to £1 billion when interest payments are added. The inquiry heard criticism of the way the contract had been drawn up, difficult relations between the contractors and the council’s tram firm TIE and repeated disputes over who was liable for extra costs.