MERSEYTRAVEL'S battle to return trams to the streets of Liverpool suffered a crushing defeat in the High Court yesterday.
The passenger transport authority failed in its bid to overturn Transport Secretary Alastair Darling's refusal to hand over £170m of crucial government funding to the £300m scheme.
Mr Justice Sullivan threw out all three grounds of Merseytravel's appeal, as well as refusing the PTA leave to appeal the decision.
It leaves the authority facing a bill of £55m for work already done on Line One, which now appears most unlikely ever to run on its proposed 11-mile route from Liverpool to Kirkby.
However, Neil Scales, director general of Merseytravel, said the authority would petition the Court of Appeal directly.
"I'm disappointed, but we owe it to the people of Merseyside to give it one last throw of the dice," he said.
The decision came at the end of a dramatic day of evidence in the High Court where it was claimed that Liverpool's departing chief executive, Sir David Henshaw, who announced his retirement on Monday, had sent a confidential report about the tram prepared for councillors in Liverpool to the Department of Transport before it had even been considered by elected members in the city.
There is no doubt that Mr Scales's own future will also be called into question in certain quarters now that the tram scheme appears to have finally reached the end of the line.
But last night he vowed to carry on, while at the same time admitting that the latest local transport plan would have to be rewritten.
"I'm acting on behalf of the PTA and the passenger transport executive (PTE). It was the PTA who took the decision unanimously to appeal. But many of our plans and goals were tram-related, things like Edge Lane and Hall Lane were relying on it being in place, so we will have to re-set things quickly and that is very difficult to do."
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