It was something of a fiasco that resulted in the use of taxpayers' money, ultimately to no purpose.
The George Square redesign affair was hardly the finest hour of Glasgow City Council leader Gordon Matheson, who masterminded it. Even the most stalwart of his supporters would have to admit that.
Yet neither he nor any other elected council official is mentioned in the "Lessons Learned" report on the episode by the council's internal auditors and there is no post-mortem about how the council's reputation was damaged because of the abortive process. Have all the lessons of the failure really been learned?
This report was produced in response to an Audit Scotland recommendation. The watchdog noted last November that Glasgow City Council embarked on the project without proper governance structures in place and "incurred costs for itself and third parties in developing proposals for the radical design that ultimately did not come to fruition".
This new review makes some reasonable points, as far as they go, and in spite of being written in the most anodyne language, but what it fails to address will concern critics more. At least it alludes to the fact that, for instance, that there should have been a better assessment from the start of how long it would take to complete the project; or that in future, with projects that are likely to generate a lot of public interest, there is a case for testing the water of public opinion before committing significant resources to the exercise (there was widely felt to have been badly insufficient public consultation before the council pushed ahead with the scheme).
It is rather odd to say the least, however, that the circumstances surrounding the termination of the exercise go unmentioned. The project ended in farce last January after judges picked a winning design for the revamped square from a shortlist, only for Mr Matheson to announce the council was abandoning the project immediately afterwards. It seems remarkable that a council audit investigating how this matter was handled could fail to mention the figure most closely associated with it, who drove it forward from the start and ultimately pulled the plug on it. Those wondering exactly what his role was behind the scenes will be none the wiser after reading this report.
The George Square revamp that never was calls to mind the controversial facelift to Union Terrace Gardens in Aberdeen, which Aberdeen City Council pressed ahead with only to find that public opinion was deeply divided. That, too, was abandoned after the first phase. Local authorities should, in theory, be more attuned to local opinion than central government, being closer to the people they serve, but in neither case could the plans championed by the councils be said to have had strong support from the public.
This incident was not in the same league as the mismanaged trams fiasco in Edinburgh, where there are calls for a full public inquiry, but there are still important questions to be answered that are not addressed by this report.
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