As the committee will well know, SEStran is one of the seven regional transport partnerships in Scotland—the statutory regional strategic transport planning bodies. We cover an area from the Scottish Borders up to the River Tay, encompassing eight local authorities and a population of about 1.5 million people.
The committee will also be aware that the fundamental role of regional transport partnerships is to produce, monitor and assist with the implementation of a regional transport strategy, which we have done within SEStran. We have recently completed a review of the first regional transport strategy, which includes a wide range of policies and proposals in support of rail freight in the region and connectivity of the region to elsewhere in Scotland and beyond.
A fundamental element of that set of policies and proposals is our firm belief that the estuary of the River Forth and its surrounding land areas form the strategic logistics gateway for Scotland to mainland Europe and beyond. There are strong policies in support of that.
In that context, we are very supportive of the policies within the third national planning framework, which identifies the need for improved water-borne freight in the Forth estuary and is very supportive of Grangemouth as a logistics centre and development centre for central Scotland.
Over the years, we have been involved in a number of European Union-funded freight-based projects, such as the dryport project, the food port project, the logistics optimisation for ports intermodality: network, opportunities, development project—LO-PINOD—and the weastflows project. Last year, under the committee’s former convener, we joined with partners in the weastflows project to give a presentation to a number of committee members on the outputs from it.
Those projects have identified a number of areas where improvements to freight logistics could be beneficial to the Scottish economy. For example in the dryport project, we have completed appraisals under the Scottish transport appraisal guidance for the Levenmouth rail link for the extension of passenger and freight services down to Levenmouth, and for the extension of the Stirling to Alloa line round to Rosyth with the Charlestown cord. It is important to get rail freight and maintain the rail freight sidings into the Rosyth port.
We have reinforced the role of Coatbridge as Scotland’s main dryport centre and we have also produced a freight map and publications of rail freight services to and from Scotland to assist the industry in choosing the potential for rail rather than depending purely on road. In the food port project, we did an analysis of food products going in and out of Scotland. We are also active in lobbying for the Rosyth to Zeebrugge freight service, and I am glad to say that, with Scottish Government support, that now seems more secure than it was 12 months ago.
In our LO-PINOD project, we have carried out studies of the empty containers in Scotland. As the committee will know, Scotland is a net exporter, unlike the rest of the UK, the net result of which is that we have to pay for the import of empty containers in order to service the export industry. We also commissioned a bulk freight study of the ports around Scotland.
The weastflows project flagged up one of the major deficiencies, which we identified in the joint regional transport partnership chairs forum’s submission to the committee, which is a shortage of robust information on freight flows. That applies not just in Scotland but throughout Europe. As part of the weastflows project, we produced a set of trip matrices for the four main modes of freight movement on a zone-by-zone basis, across something like 70-odd zones in north-west Europe. I think that that is the first time that that has been achieved.