The question of expertise is very clear. If I look back to the start of my career, which was circa 35 years ago, I worked in a regional council and I did my stint in road maintenance there. Since that time, there has been a deterioration in the road network, and particularly the local road network, and that has happened in tandem with a diminution in the number of professional engineers working in the sector. The talent is still there, but it now resides in consultancies, Transport Scotland and various contractors.
We get a very good product at a trunk road level, but there are a number of reasons why the local road network is so important. It is the last mile or the first mile in everyone’s journey. In strategic terms, nobody does a journey that is exclusively on a trunk road, unless they live in Mallaig perhaps, but that is another subject.
It is a question of how the talent is harnessed. The roads collaboration programme has shown some success, but my understanding from my membership is that it is not universal, and I am led to believe that, when councils come together, partnerships are never equal in all aspects. Believe it or not, there are different financial controls in local authorities that allow them to produce their performance indicators but which do not match up. There is certainly merit in a wider geographical input, but the governance that surrounds that needs to be investigated and reviewed. I gather that some governance review is going on under the remit of the national transport strategy, which gives me an appropriate opportunity to plug that we have a strategy.
I have always felt that maintenance, for many people, has been seen as something that comes out of the operations budget and something that people do after they have got their capital budget sorted out, and their programme of big projects. There is a danger that we concentrate on major, eye-watering projects at the expense of looking after what we already have. Anybody who owns a house will see the parallels there.
In the new strategy, there is a big emphasis on health and wellbeing and the impacts of climate change. Active travel is important, and we have evidence that, if we are trying to encourage walking and cycling, as Mr Halden mentioned, we have to do much better. There is a very negative perception of the current facilities. We are building lots of new cycleways, but we are not looking after the ones we have, and bad experiences are a big turn-off.
I think that maintenance is becoming part of strategic thinking, which it has not been in the past.