A VITAL DEAL has been reached with Edinburgh tramway builders Bilfinger Berger after a fresh period of tense negotiations, but the city council is also facing a new bill because the Scottish Government is charging for its intervention to rescue the troubled scheme.

Transport Scotland director Ainslie McLaughlin is joining the new Edinburgh Trams project board, and four or five other staff from the agency will also be working alongside the existing managers from Edinburgh City Council.

This assistance will not be free. It has emerged that the council will now be required to find 'hundreds of thousands of pounds' for the agency's services, although the government will also be paying the final £72 million outstanding from its tram project funding pot.

The leader of the Conservative group on the city council, Jeremy Balfour, responded to the news by saying that the Scottish Government had "opted out for all these years and suddenly, just when things looks as if they might have resolved themselves, they are going to take all the credit. This just means another cost for the trams."

Labour councillors were unimpressed as well. Transport spokesman Lesley Hinds said: "When the Scottish Government agreed to pay the £500 million, they took Transport Scotland off the project management board and for four-and-a-half years they have paid out millions of taxpayers' money without scrutinising how it was spent.

"At long last the government is now taking some responsibility. It's a bit of brass neck. After four-and-a-half years of not taking responsibility, they are now going to charge Edinburgh council taxpayers for it."

But the new involvement of Transport Scotland, plus an apparent end to the long-running and complex dispute with the main contractors, does suggest that the project can move forward at last, to meet its new target of launching a tram service between the airport and St Andrew Square in the summer of 2014.