Ambition plus ineptitude equals the trams fiasco

Don’t ever entrust a vast infrastructure project to an organisation that we only usually trust to empty the bins, says

This month we passed a significant milestone…. and hardly anyone noticed. With no fanfare, the Edinburgh Tram Inquiry has now taken longer than the Chilcott Inquiry into the Iraq War.

That’s right, an investigation into Britain’s role in a conflict that left over 100,000 people dead and involved allegations of weapons of mass destruction took less time than finding out what went wrong with a light rail system. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.

The roots of this fiasco go back to the calamitous original construction project which now feels like a lifetime ago.

The price tag at the beginning was £375 million but due to incompetence and mismanagement that ended up at just under a billion pounds.

The mistakes were obvious for anyone to see. Edinburgh City Council took on something way beyond it’s aptitude and ability. It repeatedly fell out with the company it set up to deliver the project, key executives fled on a regular basis and there were repeated clashes with contractors.

When the trams eventually started running in 2014 then First Minister Alex Salmond announced a public inquiry to investigate why it had gone so badly wrong and to ensure lessons were learned. We were told that would be “swift and thorough”. That was seven summers ago.

Why has it taken so long? Nobody knows. The inquiry team will only say “the final report and recommendations will be published as soon as practicable”.

What does that mean? I’m going to stand for First Minister, as soon as practicable. I’m going to learn Mandarin, as soon as practicable. For the uninitiated, as soon as practicable probably translates as ‘we have no idea whatsoever, so don’t hold your breath’.

This inquiry is now as much of an embarrassment as the project it was established to investigate.

A dripping roast for lawyers, the costs are also becoming a scandal. Already they stand at £12 million, just £1 million less than the final figure for the Chilcott Inquiry and the final bill here isn’t settled yet.

While all this is going on, you might imagine Edinburgh City Council would be nervously awaiting the outcome but you’d be wrong.

Instead of hanging back to see what lessons can be learned from taking on a vast public project without the skills or experience to deliver it, they instead ploughed ahead with the second phase of the trams, currently causing havoc throughout Newhaven and Leith.

What did Einstein say? The very definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome each time.

So let’s just save a few more years and millions of pounds and halt this farce of an inquiry because we all know what the conclusions will be anyway: the council was incompetent and out of their depth, yet no one was really responsible, and if they were they have already left the building, so can’t lose their jobs.

If we can take one lesson from this, it is not tasking a vast infrastructure project to an organisation we only usually trust to empty the bins.

The Edinburgh trams fiasco is a monument to what happens when ambition and ineptitude collide and you leave lawyers to clean up the mess afterwards. And it’s not over yet.