After last week’s article on the delay to the badly needed upgrade of the Sheriffhall roundabout, it didn’t take long to find another sign of the Scottish Government’s inability to get a grip of the project.
A Transport Scotland progress report was presented to a meeting of the Edinburgh City Region Deal Joint Committee, comprising representatives of Edinburgh, the four surrounding councils and the Scottish Borders and under normal circumstances an official would be there to talk the committee through the report and answer questions.
Very unfortunately, no Transport Scotland representative was on hand to explain why, when the outcome of a public inquiry was presented to the Scottish Government in October 2023, that no decision has been made or even the outcome revealed in 18 months.
But the report did explain the inquiry was ordered because of 2771 objections, and that "The statutory right for individuals to have their say on proposals cannot be set aside."
If that represented broad community concern it would be true, but the report points out that 2701 of the objections came via the Green Party. That’s 97 per cent of these objections generated by a party which polled 12.7 per cent of the votes in the Lothian region in the 2021 Scottish Parliament election.
It cannot be right that an unrepresentative group of activists has forced a delay which is adding thousands, if not millions of pounds to the cost of a key infrastructure investment agreed by six democratically elected councils and two governments.
