Edinburgh to go ahead with airport tram link

1 Jul 11
Edinburgh councillors have decided against pulling the plug on the city’s beleaguered tramline project, but must now raise more than £200m extra to finish it.
By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 1 July 2011

Edinburgh councillors have decided against pulling the plug on the city’s beleaguered tramline project, but must now raise more than £200m extra to finish it.

After a bitter meeting lasting more than five hours yesterday, Edinburgh City Council decided not to cancel the project or further shorten the single surviving route, and voted instead to run the line from the airport to St Andrew Square in the city centre. A Scottish National Party call to put the matter to a referendum was rejected.

The project has been dogged by failure, reflected in and exacerbated by a still unresolved legal dispute between the arm’s-length tram company, Transport Initiatives Edinburgh, and the main contractor, Bilfinger Berger. The delays have left it three years behind schedule and hundreds of millions of pounds over budget.

As a result, the scope of the project has shrivelled dramatically from the original three-line vision. This would have linked up the airport, city centre, and south Edinburgh commuter belt and run north to serve the Scottish Government headquarters and spreading residential developments along the Forth shoreline.

A report before the meeting spelled out the grim choices now facing councillors: to terminate a single line at Haymarket in the west of the city for £700m; cancel the project at a cost of £750m; or run it to St Andrew Square for £770m.

The original costing for the single airport-shoreline route, only part of which now survives in the plans, was £545m. A council study in May reported that 80% of this figure had already been spent, but only a fraction of the work had been completed.

What remains to be resolved is how the overspend will be funded. The Scottish Government has made clear that it will make no further contributions to the project, which it opposed, and all Scottish authorities face an ongoing council tax freeze.

Some fear that the council might have to meet the shortfall by raising ticket prices or cutting services on the city’s popular bus network, or even doing both. With local government elections due next year, that is an option unlikely to go down well with voters.

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