Tram inquiry told of 'secrecy' surrounding project dispute

A former council leader has told an inquiry of her frustration at a shroud of secrecy'' surrounding aspects of the Edinburgh trams project.

Jenny Dawe said it would have been useful at times for councillors to have been given more information by the local authority's arms-length body Tie (Transport Initiatives Edinburgh), particularly surrounding a dispute with contractors.

She said she has subsequently become aware of memos suggesting councillors may have been kept in the dark'' about some things but stressed she did not believe decision-making at the time was impeded by the situation.

Ms Dawe, leader of the City of Edinburgh Council from 2007-2012, was the first witness to give evidence on the initial day of public hearings for the inquiry into the capital's trams project.

The probe, chaired by retired judge Lord Hardie, is examining why the project went significantly over-budget and was delivered years later than originally planned.

The trams began operating at the end of May 2014 after six years of disruption and a long-running dispute between the council and contractors.

Ms Dawe told the inquiry, sitting in central Edinburgh, that there was a huge amount of secrecy'', particularly surrounding the dispute.

Asked by Jonathan Lake QC, senior counsel to the inquiry, about the impact of confidentiality on the project, Ms Dawe said: I think I found it most frustrating when it was concerning the dispute resolution process ...

The information we were getting was that the dispute resolution was going in favour of Tie - they described it as a win or lose situation, we were winning and the other side was losing ... it soon became obvious that that really wasn't perhaps quite what the situation was. It would have been useful to have been given a bit more information at times.

Also about the costs and the timing, very often we were told, 'Oh no we can't tell you that' particularly when matters reached what might be called a stand-off with the consortium.

We were basically told, 'No we can't give you that information'.

Certainly the implication was 'You can't be trusted not to tell the consortium what we, Tie, are thinking and so we're not going to give you information'.''

She said she formed the impression from discussion with others that perhaps Tie were being bullish about things when they shouldn't have been''.

Ms Dawe said the dispute process was quite convoluted'' and said the council was asked to take the view that Tie was pursuing the correct strategy.

She went on: However, it's fair to say we did not have all the detailed figures because we were told the contract did not allow either party, Tie or the consortium, to actually discuss any matters of dispute resolution with anybody outside the two contract holders.''

Nevertheless, the former leader said that by a point in 2011, the council had taken 74 decisions concerning the tram project.

Every time that we as a council took a decision on the trams project we did that on the basis that we felt we had enough information to reach the conclusion that we did,'' she stressed.

Asked whether claims of confidentiality by officials had hampered decision-making, she said: I don't think it impeded the decision-making.

However, I have to put a caveat to that, in that looking at the documents for this inquiry I have found that there were internal, highly confidential memos going around which did suggest that councillors were perhaps being kept in the dark.

But at the time, apart from the shroud of secrecy around certain aspects of the details of disputes and the precise amount of money that was likely to be required, we felt we had enough.'