“Heads should be rolling” over officials keeping the public in the dark for months about the spiralling costs of the V&A, the Scottish Secretary has said.
Alistair Carmichael spoke out after The Courier revealed officials at the local authority told ministers last April the project was going to run over budget eight months before they told taxpayers.
The Liberal Democrat MP called on Nicola Sturgeon to investigate the reasons for elected officials keeping the overspend secret from last spring, before the independence referendum.
The Scottish Government believes its decision not to break news of the project’s spiralling costs was the correct one as doing so could have jeopardised the project.
However, Mr Carmichael said: “If the Scottish Government were told in April last year of the scale and the nature of the problems that project was having and they didn’t put that into the public domain, then really heads should be rolling.
“If I were in Nicola Sturgeon’s position, I would want to know why that was the case because that’s the sort of game playing which really does damage public confidence.
“Construction costs go up, they go down. You could see how something like the sharp fall in oil prices can have an impact, probably a favourable impact, on the cost of something like that but that does sound suspiciously like a bit of low politics.
“This is an £80 million project now and I think taxpayers have the right to be asking of the Scottish Government: ‘What is your concern here? Is it the effective use of our money or is it saving your own political face?’”
Mr Carmichael also hinted he would be prepared to find more money for the building, if it is needed, to ensure the jewel in the waterfront regeneration becomes a reality.
“We have put money in already, the Heritage Lottery Fund has put just short of £14 million in,” he said.
“We have quite exceptionally, actually, contributed to a project like that, which is the sensible thing to do because this is a project of national significance.
“It’s not just a Dundee project. But even at that, I think everyone knows that where public money is concerned it has to be properly administered, it has got to be properly accounted for and there has to be a degree of rigour in the management of it.”
In response to Mr Carmichael’s comments, a spokeswoman for the Scottish Government said it had been informed in April last year, within the bounds of “commercial confidentiality”, that the initial cost estimate for the V&A Dundee project would not be met.
“Disclosure of this information at that stage would have prejudiced substantially the commercial interests of Dundee City Council as the contracting authority,” she added.
West End Lib Dem councillor Fraser Macpherson said he was “furious” about what he described as a “smokescreen”.
He said: “I was totally shocked to learn that the SNP government had been advised of the budget problems back in April 2014, but no attempt was made to advise all councillors of the situation.”
He called for “fast progress” to be made on John McClelland’s independent investigation of the V&A process.