Hardie report on Edinburgh trams finally out

[snowball]

True cost of Edinburgh tram line has exceeded £1bn, says report

Public inquiry highlights ‘litany of avoidable failures’ involving project company Tie, council and ministers

www.theguardian.com

A damning report on the chaos that beset Edinburgh’s tram line says its true cost has soared to well over £1bn because of a “litany of avoidable failures”.

The long-awaited report from a public inquiry into the project calls for new powers to prosecute businesses that make “false statements” to councillors, and substantial changes in the way Scotland oversees tram projects in future.

Lord Hardie, a retired judge, concluded that Tie, the company originally set up to deliver the line, but also Edinburgh council and Scottish ministers shared the blame for its huge cost overruns, delays and the resulting damage to the city’s economy.

“Poor management and abdication of responsibility on a large scale have had a significant and lasting impact on the lives and livelihoods of Edinburgh residents, and the reputation of the city,” Hardie said.

Cammy Day, the Edinburgh council leader, apologised for “the serious mistakes” the council had made and admitted the debacle had seriously affected residents and damaged the city’s reputation.

However, Day said the tram had since “flourished”, with 1.2m tram journeys recorded in August this year.

 

[endecotp]

I’ve read the Executive Summary (90 pages!!) so you don’t have to.

It attributes most of the blame to “tie”. Their attitude seems to have been that anything was better than the project being cancelled, even lying to councillors. There wasn’t enough skepticism from the council who assumed that tie and the council were “on the same side” and could trust each other.

Things started to go wrong when the design took longer than expected. They should have delayed the construction tender but didn’t, so the construction contract included terms allowing for variation as the design evolved. So it was no longer a fixed-cost, low-risk-to-council deal but rather one where most of the risk was taken by the council.

Something that is not mentioned (as far as I have seen) is who was responsible for the initial constitution of tie and the appointments to it. Who were these people? What was their experience?

Something else that occurred to me a few hours into reading it was the amazingly tiny number of women involved; basically just one council solicitor and council chief executive Sue Bruce.

 

[Kingston Dan]

I’ve read the Executive Summary (90 pages!!) so you don’t have to.

It attributes most of the blame to “tie”. Their attitude seems to have been that anything was better than the project being cancelled, even lying to councillors. There wasn’t enough skepticism from the council who assumed that tie and the council were “on the same side” and could trust each other.

Things started to go wrong when the design took longer than expected. They should have delayed the construction tender but didn’t, so the construction contract included terms allowing for variation as the design evolved. So it was no longer a fixed-cost, low-risk-to-council deal but rather one where most of the risk was taken by the council.

Something that is not mentioned (as far as I have seen) is who was responsible for the initial constitution of tie and the appointments to it. Who were these people? What was their experience?

Something else that occurred to me a few hours into reading it was the amazingly tiny number of women involved; basically just one council solicitor and council chief executive Sue Bruce.

Cllr Jenny Dawe was leader of the city council from 2007 to 2012.

 

[gravitystorm]

Something that is not mentioned (as far as I have seen) is who was responsible for the initial constitution of tie and the appointments to it. Who were these people? What was their experience?

That's touching on the most interesting bit for me - who came up with all the structures? And is there some framework that they should have been following, or is every large arms-length project structure just made up from scratch? It's not as if your typical local authority (e.g. CEC in this case) is routinely creating arms-length bodies to handle multi-hundred-million pound transport contracts. I would have thought there is some off-the-shelf national "fill in the blanks" agreement that has been shown to work elsewhere and has a suitable division of responsibilities between councils and arms-length bodies already written down. Otherwise if each council makes one up from scratch, there's potential for gaping fault-lines to appear in the contracts and nobody involved has done this kind of thing before.

Or perhaps it makes little difference, given the tendency for the participants to chop and change the agreements, appoint themselves into inappropriate positions (para 103), ignore the PRINCE2 requirements about who should do what (para 80-81) - nevermind the outright lying to the councillors that was going on (para 146 and onwards). So perhaps the design of the structures wasn't so critical to the outcome?

Another point could be made about the Scottish Parliament oversight of their own contributions. When they pulled out their advisers (para 188), why did this not trigger the Audit Scotland to reassess? It beggars belief that after having said "We're OK with spending £500m, we have sufficient oversight" and then the oversight can just be removed and ... nothing happens? There's no process triggered to change an existing decision from "GO" to "NO GO" when one of the most important inputs changes? Sheesh.

It all sounds a bit like amateur hour, but involving hundreds of millions of pounds. And maybe it's normal and most projects just work out fine (or not too far wrong) regardless, and it's only occasionally that circumstances uncover all the fault lines and it blows up to this level.