Swinney: ‘I was misled. Tie told me absolute rubbish’

Finance secretary John Swinney has said he was “fundamentally misled” by the publicly owned company that was set up to deliver the trams project.

Mr Swinney said information he received from tram firm Tie (formerly Transport Initiatives Edinburgh) throughout the course of the troubled project was “total rubbish”.

He said he had contemplated intervening in the project at several stages during the construction, which has been dogged by delays and cost overruns.

The original budget for taking the line from Edinburgh airport to Newhaven was £545 million, but that has risen to £776m.

Mr Swinney said: “Now, on the question of why didn’t I move in at different stages, I contemplated it, I came very close to doing it at different stages, but what I felt at different stages when I was, you know, pursuing that line of inquiry, examining what was going on.

“I was at the receiving end of information passed to me by the city council, in good faith I would have to say, principally from Tie. And I think it was absolute rubbish. Total rubbish. And I certainly feel fundamentally misled by Tie as an organisation.

“I think they fundamentally misled the city council, and as a consequence created enormous difficulties for the project.

“And the fact that Tie has essentially faced its day of reckoning is an outcome which I think was too long in the coming.”

The project was devised by the previous Labour-Liberal Democrat administration at Holyrood.When the SNP came to power in 2007 they handed full control over the delivery of the trams to Edinburgh council.

The Scottish Government’s Transport Scotland agency was instructed to have no input, other than signing off the £500m funding, and the council set up Tie to deliver the trams.

However, Tie has now been removed from the project following a prolonged contractual dispute with contractor Bilfinger Berger, and Mr Swinney has instructed Transport Scotland to have a greater oversight in future.

Mr Swinney added: “I think they [Tie] got themselves into a ditch and they just kept on digging, and as they kept on digging, it just got worse and worse and worse.

“And what that was about, it was about Tie being fundamentally unable to take forward a constructive relationship with the contractors on this project.

“Let me give you a comparison: Bilfinger Berger were the principal contractors on the M80. Did we have a problem with Bilfinger Berger? Not a bit of it. Perfectly decent company to work with.”

Lewis Macdonald, a former Labour deputy transport minister, who was in office when the tram project was devised, said the project was “neglected and allowed to go well off the rails by an incoming government”.

He said: “John Swinney talked about how badly advised he was by Tie. The reality is he chose, in 2007, to walk away from the project and to pull the Transport Scotland people off that board who were carrying out day-to-day supervision of the project, and then a year later the project went off the rails.”

The Conservatives’ transport spokesman, Jackson Carlaw, said: “John Swinney has further confirmed what everyone else knows – that the tram project was a complete fiasco.

“What is extraordinary is that he accepted this information at face value and chose not to challenge it.

“When it is the taxpayer who is paying handsomely for this failure, they would have expected far more from Mr Swinney than this.”

Lib Dem city council leader Jenny Dawe said: “In a letter to the First Minister, dated 27 September, I acknowledged the lengthy and difficult nature of the tram project and welcomed a public inquiry in order that the full circumstances surrounding it can be openly and properly examined.”