Letter: Trams solution

Allan Alstead (Platform, 24 August) is right to say that the tram project has been badly managed by the council and that there has been a failure of oversight by the Scottish Government, which has handed out the money without asking questions.

The project was given a clean bill of health by Audit Scotland in 2007 and it could all have worked out so differently.

All this and more will have to be the subject of an inquiry in due course but the priority for now must be to complete the route from the airport to Newhaven and to drive as hard a bargain as possible with Bilfinger Berger, the company that has been holding up the work and trying to extract as much as possible from the public purse.

If that means somebody else completing part of the route then so be it. The problem of cost overruns must be dealt with by imaginative new funding arrangements that do not involve extra cost for council tax payers.

I have written to finance secretary John Swinney suggesting the use of tax increment financing whereby the council would borrow to cover any funding shortfall and retain extra business rate income arising from the tram development in order to pay back the debt.

Nobody with the interests of Edinburgh and Scotland at heart can seriously want this project to fail and I hope we can all work together to solve this problem in spite of earlier disagreements.

Malcolm Chisholm

MSP for Edinburgh North and Leith

Edinburgh