Clean sweep

Published on 30/06/2012 00:00

BRIAN Ferguson (“Trams facing revolt over street shutdown”, 29 June) rightly identifies the intense anger among residents of the city to the latest unexpected announcement of tram works closures to the York Place section of the main east/west link across Edinburgh.

However, this comes as no surprise to residents’ groups in the New Town, which have seen this coming for many months, yet council officials have taken a deliberate decision to avoid telling the public what was really meant by taking the tram to St Andrew Square.

Sue Bruce and her officials who have taken over responsibility for delivering the tram project, were warned that York Place would be a major problem, but that was ignored.

Perhaps the previous administration decided to avoid telling the public, but the chief executive and her officials should certainly have warned the new Labour-led administration and taken steps to mitigate the problem before this blunt announcement.

For too long there has been a culture of secrecy and withholding information so as to deceive the public; this must stop. We have a failed team of incompetent officials leading the introduction of what has proved to the worst planned, most unpopular and appallingly managed project that Scotland has seen.

What is worrying is that many of these are the same people who mismanaged the disastrous Central Edinburgh Traffic Management Plan, as well as the congestion charge fiasco and who have turned our road network into something worse than many third world countries.

There needs to be a cull of incompetents – no-one seems to take responsibility, no-one gets sacked, but instead they get a hefty financial bonus to recognise failure.

The new councillors should take a grip of this situation and there needs to be a clearout of all those responsible for failure – with no reward for incompetence.

The new brooms should get active right away.

Allan Alstead

Moray Place

Edinburgh