Swinney’s job to be informed about trams

Maybe he was, but wasn’t he personally responsible for pulling his senior civil servants – from Transport Scotland – off the tram project board back in June 2007? Mr Swinney recently (September 2011) reinstated them, presumably realising the catastrophic mistake that had been made more than years ago.

And isn’t it any minister’s job to ensure that information given to them from third parties is accurate and reliable? Yet John Swinney appears to have been the only person in Scotland not to have known the tram project was in deep trouble by early 2009.

Why didn’t he put Transport Scotland back on the project then (if not before) and why is he now thrashing around trying to blame others for everything going so badly wrong?

It’s clear that this project has been beset by a failure of leadership – at the government level by withdrawal of proper oversight, and at the council level where all of the SNP/Liberal Democrat councillors in charge of the capital city voted to sign the current contracts on 1 May, 2008 and then failed to lead the project.

Mr Swinney should now do the decent thing and order an immediate public inquiry. If he doesn’t, you can’t help but wonder whether he is more worried about just what it might conclude.

Julie Marshall

Calder Gardens

Edinburgh

I couldn’t help laughing out loud when I read your article about John Swinney being misled on the cost of the Edinburgh trams.

“I was misled. Tie told me absolute rubbish,” raged an indignant Mr Swinney.

This wouldn’t be the same John Swinney who, as finance minister, stood up in the Scottish Parliament in December 2007 and told the chamber that the cost for twin tunnels under the Forth was too expensive at “£6.6 billion”.

It is worth comparing Mr Swinney’s costs with the Hindhead Tunnel, a pair of dual-carriageway motorway tunnels that opened on 29 July, 2011 as part of the Hindhead bypass in Surrey.

Twin tunnels were preferred to the much cheaper option of a surface motorway because the route of the A3 passes through an site of special scientific interest.

The total cost for these important twin tunnels taking traffic under the beautiful Devil’s Punch Bowl, plus four miles of motorway, was £371 million, of which £283.65m, (1.83 km at £155,000 per metre) was spent on the two dual-carriageway bored tunnels.

If we had enticed the contractors who did the A3 tunnels north of the Border to work for us we could have had twin dual-carriageway motorway tunnels for 23.27 km. Put another way we could have had two tunnels from South Queensferry to Kinross.

Mr Swinney could have almost driven home to his Perthshire constituency, in a tunnel!

Aye John, it is terrible when someone tells us, as you put it, “absolute rubbish” about costs.

Tom Minogue

Victoria Terrace

Dunfermline