Flying saucers will land in Gorgie before new junction constructed for £120m

‘Centaurs will land in flying saucers from Alpha Centauri before the new junction is built for £120m,’ says John McLellan

In the case of the Sheriffhall Roundabout it’s actually longer, because the much-needed junction improvement has been part of the Edinburgh City Region deal for over six years and nothing has been done.

It only takes light 4.3 years to get here from the Centaurus constellation, and at the current rate of progress it could be that again before the thing is actually completed. A meeting of Edinburgh City Council’s policy and sustainability committee this week heard the outcome of a government inquiry was still awaited before detailed designs could be drawn up, never mind someone sticking a spade in the ground.

Yet the inquiry report was completed and submitted to ministers over a year ago and still nothing has been announced. New SNP transport minister Fiona Hyslop may be mired in half-built ferries and other unbuilt roads elsewhere, but at the very least she could get the report out and let the public see what conclusions were drawn.

It’s therefore bizarre that the latest report on City Deal progress still has the cost of the project as on-budget, which we are supposed to believe is the same £120 million budget agreed in 2018.

Centaurs will land in flying saucers from Alpha Centauri before the new junction is built for £120m, given how construction prices rocketed at the height of the pandemic and the start of the Ukraine War, so why this is not acknowledged is a mystery.

The answer is that Transport Scotland is supposed to make up the difference, as if that doesn’t matter, when it’s all taxpayers’ money of which the Scottish Government says it has run out.

So, here’s a prediction: the Sheriffhall flyover will never be built and the £120m diverted to other parts of the deal. The question then is on what? It doesn’t take much to identify another City Deal money pit, the one which is meant to be dug behind St Andrew Square to accommodate the new Dunard Concert Hall.

This time last year it was reported that the cost had soared from an original £40m to £114m, and the latest report reveals that it has now soared to, er, £114m. Although construction inflation is down considerably to 1.9 per cent, it’s still up, but we are supposed to accept the cost is unchanged.

Nor is there any suggestion of future cost pressures, despite the Building Cost Information Service only last month estimating that building costs will increase by 15 per cent over the next five years. And that will be on average, which the constrained Dunard site and its expensive design is very much not.

At the behest of Conservative group leader Iain Whyte, fresh updates on the costs and progress of these two key projects will be provided in the first half of next year, but not for the first time recently were councillors just expected to nod through reports which are clearly lacking in complete and accurate detail.

The mess the council got into over the original tram project was in large part due to officers not wanting details of problems aired in public, and despite claims that lessons were learnt, it appears nothing has changed.