Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, September 27, 2018

Official Report 735KB pdf

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“Forth Replacement Crossing”

Welcome back. We will now examine the “Forth Replacement Crossing” report. I welcome back Caroline Gardner, the Auditor General for Scotland. She is joined by Graeme Greenhill, senior manager, and Jillian Matthew, audit manager, who are both from Audit Scotland. I invite the Auditor General to make an opening statement.

Thank you, convener. The report looks at Transport Scotland’s management of the Forth replacement crossing project, including the construction of the Queensferry crossing. I will summarise the findings under three areas: the need for a new crossing; the management of the project; and demonstration of whether the intended benefits of the project have been achieved.

First, the Government identified a clear need for a replacement crossing. Corrosion of the main cables of the Forth road bridge would have meant restricting traffic on it from 2017, and ministers made a timely decision to ensure that the road connection between Edinburgh and Fife was maintained. Transport Scotland’s decision to build a new cable-stayed bridge was cheaper than repairing the old one or building an alternative type of crossing or tunnel. Its design was intended to be easier to construct and more reliable and resilient. Exhibit 2 on page 10 of the report sets out the key features of the new bridge.

Secondly, at £1.34 billion, the Forth replacement crossing project is one the biggest public sector infrastructure projects that Scotland has seen. On such a large and complex project, there are many opportunities for things to veer off track, and it is to Transport Scotland’s credit that they did not. In part 2 of the report, we highlight the good practice in the procurement process that helped to deliver value for money. The team had the right mix of skills and experience and it invested in the external expertise that it needed early in the project. From start to finish, the team demonstrated strong, consistent leadership and communicated well with contractors and stakeholder groups. It was strong on budgeting, governance, quality assurance and risk management. We think that there is a lot that the wider public sector can learn from how the project was managed, and we have recommended that the Scottish Government and Transport Scotland should share the lessons as widely as possible.

The Queensferry crossing opened eight months later than first expected and 10 weeks later than the contract end date, but we concluded that the reasons for that were reasonable and that Transport Scotland managed the changes effectively to minimise the effect on time, cost and quality. There is still some work to complete on the new bridge, which is to be expected on a project of this kind. Our only criticism is that Transport Scotland could have communicated that better to manage the public’s expectations, and it should continue to keep the public updated on progress.

Thirdly, it is too early for some of the project’s wider benefits, such as improving public transport across the Forth, cutting journey times and boosting economic growth, to be demonstrated. We set out progress against each of the eight project objectives in exhibit 9 on page 36, but more detail is needed on how success will be measured in future. Transport Scotland now needs to produce a clearer plan for how it will measure the success of the project’s wider benefits. It plans to carry out a full post-project evaluation later this year, and we will continue to review progress through our audit work.

The report seems to be unrelenting good news, so we ought to congratulate the Government. Throughout the report, reference is made to good practice and success story after success story. Given that other projects have been less successfully managed, how do we effectively transfer the good practice that has been learned in relation to this project to other projects in the public sector?

We think that the Forth replacement crossing project was well managed, and it is to the credit of the Government and Transport Scotland that they achieved that. We have recommended that they should look at how they can spread those lessons more widely, not just to infrastructure projects but to big digital projects, to which many of the principles apply. On our website, we have produced a hub that pulls together all the materials that we have developed in this area, to which people can refer.

I will ask Jillian Matthew what else we think can be done to make those lessons a reality and get some of the benefits in future.

As the Auditor General said, it was a very well managed project, which is not something that, as auditors, we often see. You will know from audits of other projects that we have looked at that that is not always the case. The need to get the right building blocks in place right from the beginning is absolutely fundamental and cannot be underestimated. Time must be spent getting the scope right and understanding the costs, the risks and optimism bias, which we mention in the report. It is possible to underestimate what can go wrong and capacity has to be built in for dealing with things that are not anticipated. A lot of that is well known. We have looked at that in other reports and have talked about what good practice looks like and the need for projects to be well managed, but that does not always translate. There are various reasons for good practice not being adopted, such as time pressures, but I think that it is often the case that not enough time is spent getting things right at the start before proceeding.

10:00  

As the Auditor General said, there is a lot that can be learned from the Forth replacement crossing project, and not just for infrastructure projects. There are many generic project management lessons that can be applied to many other major projects. We have recommended that Transport Scotland should make sure that it applies those lessons in future work. Throughout the project, it made sure that lessons that were learned were shared across other projects, such as the dualling of the A9. The Scottish Government has a role to play in making sure that such learning is shared right across the public sector.

Has the Scottish Government given any indication of how it will do that?

Not at the moment. Transport Scotland and the Scottish Government have accepted that the lessons learned need to be shared and have said that they will do that, but we do not know exactly how they intend to do that.

Can I chip in? One of the things that we do with every performance audit is prepare an impact report; we usually do that about 18 months after the publication of the original report. I am the auditor of Transport Scotland. At the appropriate time, as part of my audit of Transport Scotland, I will look at how the Government and Transport Scotland respond to the “Forth Replacement Crossing” report.

Having proven that a large project can be well managed and delivered in the way that the public would expect, it would certainly be a shame if we did not build on that success. There seems to be no reason why what has been done in building the Queensferry crossing cannot be done across the whole public sector if we can just take what we have learned and apply it.

I want to raise what you say in paragraph 33 of your report. Is what is detailed there normal in the trade? I have not seen that practice in any previous project. Was it simply because of the scale of the project that it was agreed that such payments would be made? It was agreed that bidders would be paid reasonable costs up to £10 million, which is a lot of money, in the event that the contract did not go ahead. Is that normal?

It is unusual and, as you can imagine, we looked at it very closely. I will ask Graeme Greenhill to talk you through what we concluded about it.

There are two separate elements here. First, there was the fact that the tendering was being undertaken at the same time that the Forth Crossing Bill was proceeding through Parliament. Therefore, there was always a risk that the bill might fail and the bridge would not proceed, which would have left bidders out of pocket. Transport Scotland took the view that if that happened, it would need to compensate the bidders for the costs that they had incurred.

Secondly, there was the offer that Transport Scotland would pay up to £5 million towards the unsuccessful bidder’s costs. That was there to ensure that competitive tension still existed and that there would be more than one bidder in the process. As Caroline Gardner said, it is unusual, but it is not unknown for clients to go down such a route. I think that it was done in view of the size of the project and the likely costs that bidders would incur in developing their tender proposals.

From the point of view of Audit Scotland, does it seem a reasonable expense to incur?

We concluded that it was.

The effect of the decisions that Transport Scotland took was to make sure that the procurement process remained competitive. It kept two bidders in the process to the point at which a decision was made, which helped to keep costs down and to generate a strong form of contract that was cost limited, thereby reducing the scope for cost overruns to come through. As always, there is a balance to be struck on where the risks are best managed, and we thought that it was a reasonable decision that paid off in the end.

Just to be absolutely clear, it is only the unsuccessful bidder who got £4.2 million. The successful bidder got nothing, because they made the profit on the contract.

Yes. The successful bidder won the contract. The unsuccessful bidder was reimbursed £4.2 million for the cost of bidding, and that helped to make the procurement a competitive process.

The procurement process and the bill that set up the project ran concurrently. I understand why that was the case. If I might use your words, you said that that paid off this time. I give credit where it is due—it worked this time—but it might not have done. Is that a practice that you would advocate in future or did Transport Scotland get a bit lucky this time?

We concluded that, in this case, it was a reasonable decision. We were in the unusual circumstance in which all the engineering evidence suggested that restrictions were likely to be required on the traffic that the old Forth road bridge could carry by 2017. Given the timescale for a project of such a scale, waiting longer to start the procurement process would have run the risk of significant road closures, disruption and impact on the economy of Scotland, particularly in Fife and the Lothians.

That is not to say that I think that such an approach should automatically be taken for future contracts. As always, what we are looking for is intelligent application of the principles of good procurement and good project management rather than a cookie-cutter approach, whereby something that worked for one project is automatically assumed to be the right answer for another one. That is certainly not what we are saying.

On that point, you and the Accounts Commission recently produced a joint report summarising your findings on various major projects and procurement lessons. Do you have any plans to publicise that report or to disseminate it more widely?

We are doing quite a lot on that. I ask Graeme Greenhill to pick up that one.

We have certainly made people aware of that report. As Caroline Gardner said, it appears on our hub that brings together all relevant reports on major capital projects, together with the summary of findings. We have made sure that Transport Scotland is aware of its existence, and we have been working closely with the Institution of Civil Engineers Scotland to make it aware of the hub. We are continuing to work on that.

I will take a slightly more personal view. I have been crossing the Forth since the original bridge opened in 1964 and I continue to do so on the new one. I do not want to rain on anybody’s parade, but Colin Beattie’s unrelenting good news is maybe as seen from afar. From a bit closer up, I see unrelenting delays. The bridge opened and then immediately closed. I have crossed in the evening and found two lanes closed and had to bump across on the hard shoulder, and I have had correspondence from constituents who have had the same experience. You say that some work is being done, but it seems to be more than some work. Was the bridge actually finished when it opened? You say that you are going to look at its operation in future. Will you be a little more critical of Transport Scotland? We have an empty bridge with virtually no traffic on it, but we still have traffic queued up on the new bridge.

I will ask the team to come in in a moment. It is important for me to state for the record that the new bridge was not intended to increase capacity for traffic crossing the Forth. It was a replacement for the Forth road bridge, with any increase in demand to be met through increased public transport, which is one of the project objectives that is still not fully delivered. We make a recommendation that there should be a plan for delivering that objective, with clear measures of how that is affecting the situation.

I ask Graeme Greenhill to pick up on the question of snaggings and our conclusions in that area.

It is important to recognise that snagging is by no means unknown for any major project. There undoubtedly was a list of snaggings that needed to be completed. The transport minister has informed Parliament of the list of works that needed to be done. None of the snagging work prevented the bridge from opening at the time, although Bill Bowman is correct that, subsequently, there was a need for a temporary closure to level off some tarmac joints in the bridge.

The one main area of snagging that remains outstanding relates to painting the underside of the bridge. That will not now be completed until September 2019. That is largely because of the specialist equipment—the cradle—that is required to get underneath to provide access to the undersurface of the bridge. That work will not be completed until the end of 2019, but it is not having any effect on the operation of the bridge.

It is having an effect for those who try to cross the bridge in the evening and who find that it is down to one lane, with a long queue waiting to cross. We all know about snagging from buying a house. It is about there being a crack up in the corner; it is not about the roof not being finished or something like that. The term “snagging” implies minor repairs. If, as you say, the work needs to continue until the end of 2019—I presume that lane closures will continue until then—I cannot agree that there is not something wrong in the way that the bridge has been managed. However, your report is your report, and I hope that you will come back to the issue of how the bridge is being operated.

I have a question on the costs. On page 29, you talk about inflation of 5.3 per cent being included in the estimates. Is that correct?

Sorry, but which page did you say?

It is on page 29, in the bottom graphic. As I understand it, inflation probably came in at about zero, using the appropriate index. Does that mean that a lot of the cost saving comes from there being no inflation?

There certainly were savings as a result of inflation, but there were savings from other areas. We set that out—

Can you give me a number for the inflation savings?

The third bullet point in paragraph 60, which is at the top of page 33, says that price fluctuation costs were £60 million to £205 million lower than first projected, which was essentially due to inflation.

So £200 million was saved by inflation. You say that the project was well managed but, if inflation came in at £200 million less than expected, that takes away quite a lot of the trumpeted saving.

That was the range that was allowed for. The £200 million was the upper figure, but the saving was actually closer to the lower figure. When Transport Scotland was estimating the costs and trying to understand the various aspects of that, it was a very uncertain time. It was in 2009 and 2010, which was not long after the economic crash, and it was difficult to estimate what inflation would be for what was a 10-year project. Transport Scotland allowed for a range, but throughout the project—

When you say that there was a cost saving of whatever, how much of that was actually due to inflation not being as high as estimated?

I am not sure that we are talking about cost savings; we are talking about the amount by which the total cost came in under the budget for the project.

Is that not savings?

It is not savings in the way that you are describing. The project came in below budget, and international data suggests that nine out of 10 such projects do not; they overrun on cost or time. In paragraph 60, we set out the key changes to the cost between 2011, which is when the contract was let, and 2017, when it concluded. We break it down into things such as risk allowance, optimism bias, inflation, the costs relating to the principal contract and other elements of the project as a whole as opposed to simply the bridge construction.

I am trying to understand whether Transport Scotland did something good in the management of the project or whether it just benefited from inflation being less than was originally estimated.

I would frame that a bit differently. I think that Transport Scotland let a good contract that placed the risk for those elements with the contractor rather than with Transport Scotland, and it was able to do that because of the work that had gone in beforehand, as Jillian Matthew suggested, to appraise the options and ensure that the form of the contract was competitive.

I do not want to labour the point, as we probably have other questions, but you have given an original number and said that the costs were less, so how much of that was due to inflation? That is all that I am trying to establish. It is about the estimated 5.3 per cent figure for inflation versus what it turned out to be.

10:15  

The price—

If you do not have the information, I am happy to get it later or to get an explanation later.

I am not sure that we can add to that. Sorry—Jillian Matthew wants to come in.

I have a breakdown of some of the costs and what they were at the beginning of the project and at the end. We are talking about ranges, and a lot of changes happened within the different figures for different reasons. At the start, the overall estimate was £1.4 billion to £1.6 billion. Within that, a lower figure of £91 million was allowed for price fluctuation or inflation, and the final figure was around £31 million. However, that was the lower range, and there was also a higher range. As we set out at the beginning of part 2, good project management involves putting in the time to understand the costs. Obviously, inflation is very difficult to predict. When the budget was being set, the Scottish Parliament information centre produced a report that examined the costs and it was satisfied with the way that the costings had been done, which included looking at economic reports. It was difficult to estimate what inflation would be after two years.

I understand that, but I think that an element in how well the project was managed is that there was good fortune because inflation was less than estimated.

As we also say in the report, inflation is underestimated far too often, as is the element of optimism bias. We felt that those things were considered and built into the project very well. The situation was monitored all the way through and the budget adjusted accordingly.

There was an element of good fortune but, as we say in case study 1 on page 21, a number of measures were built in to the contract approach that helped to deliver value for money. The fixed-price contract was one, as was the value-engineering approach, which let contractors suggest improvements to the project. All those things fed through so, although there clearly was an element of good luck with inflation, the project team did not just get lucky because inflation was low.

I have two questions on the wider evaluation of the impact of the bridge. First, how broad and deep will the evaluation be? Will it be a wide-ranging economic and employment impact assessment or will it be narrower than that? Secondly, does the baseline data exist for making an objective evaluation at this stage? Is this not closing the door after the horse has bolted?

That is a very good question. Exhibit 9, which is on page 36, sets out in graphic form the project’s eight objectives plus our assessment of whether they have been achieved or whether they are still to be assessed. The wider ones that you are touching on, such as supporting sustainable economic development and economic growth, are very definitely in the still-to-be-assessed category.

Jillian Matthew might want to say a bit more about Transport Scotland’s plans for evaluation.

Transport Scotland has plans to evaluate the impact at one year, three years and five years after opening the bridge. Some of the objectives, such as those on economic sustainability and development, are longer-term objectives. We say in the report that there was not enough detail in some of Transport Scotland’s plans for measuring some of the outcomes, although there was quite a lot of detail on issues such as traffic flow and other easier to measure things. Also, it was not clear at what point Transport Scotland was going to be able to say whether it had reached the outcomes. I do not think that Transport Scotland will have measured whether the outcomes have been reached by the time of the first evaluation, which is after one year, but we would not expect some of the outcomes to be achieved by that point anyway. However, it is not clear at what point we will be able to see what progress has been made on the different outcomes and whether that will be at three years or five years.

To measure an outcome, you need to have figures for year zero, or the starting point before the bridge was built. Does Transport Scotland have that information?

Again, that was less clear with some of the longer-term and more difficult to measure outcomes. Obviously, there is a baseline for things such as traffic flow. However, the methods that Transport Scotland described for how to measure some of the outcomes were set out at quite a high level. One of our recommendations is that there needs to be a lot more detail on how Transport Scotland is going to do that and what data it will use. It is talking about surveys and looking at decisions that businesses have made on setting up in areas around the Forth and how those have been affected by the project.

Was there not some fairly well defined Treasury guidance—it used to be called the green book—about how to measure economic impact? Why is Transport Scotland not just following that?

The green book focuses more on project appraisal than on project evaluation, but obviously you need to follow the line through. We say a bit in paragraph 66 about Transport Scotland’s plans for evaluation. The second bullet point describes its plans to compare pre-opening and post-opening employment patterns from a range of secondary sources. Transport Scotland has plans but, as Jillian Matthew says, we have not yet seen the detail of the particular data sources that it expects to use and the way in which it will pull that together at each of the three evaluation points. In broad terms, the plans are there. We are just raising the caveat that, at this point, the plans are not detailed enough for us to be clear that Transport Scotland will be able to demonstrate whether the benefits have been achieved.

Do you think that Transport Scotland might not be able to do it, or has it just not got round to it and, if so, when will it get round to it?

My experience over the past six years of doing this job suggests that people often do not pay as much attention to evaluation after a project has been delivered or a service has been developed. We feel that the plans that Transport Scotland has described to us are good in that context, but we cannot yet give you the assurance that it will be able to evaluate all eight of the benefits fully. Clearly, the ones on social inclusion and economic growth are the more difficult ones to evaluate.

Graeme Greenhill might want to add to that.

I will be looking at that as part of the audit of Transport Scotland in the fullness of time.

When is your next audit of Transport Scotland?

It is an annual audit of the financial statements. The first evaluation report is expected later this year, so I can have a look at that as part of the 2018-19 audit of Transport Scotland.

We should ensure that that audit is circulated to the committee when it is published to see whether there is anything in it that we want to pursue. The whole justification for these huge expenditures is to a large extent based on the economic impact. Obviously, there was an urgent situation with the old bridge that in itself justified the investment, but we might as well look at the wider economic benefits for future reference, if nothing else.

I absolutely agree.

Some of those outcomes related to promoting public transport across the Forth. Paragraph 71 tells us:

“Transport Scotland plans to publish an update on progress in late 2018.”

We are almost in October now. Do you have any information about likely publication?

As far as I am aware, that is still the plan.

But you do not have any indication of the likely publication date.

To some extent, the thinking around the public transport strategy will be influenced by the initial evaluation, which is due to be finalised around about now. I suspect that Transport Scotland will be feeding the result of that evaluation work into its wider thinking about public transport.

I have a few wrap-up questions, the first of which is on cost. Key message 1 in the summary says that the final cost was £1.34 billion, but that total includes the costs from when the project was first scoped in 2007 up to the end of the five-year maintenance period in 2022. Given that that is projecting forward, is there a risk that the cost could increase?

Not that we are aware of. Obviously, it is still to happen, but the on-going maintenance is being carried out by another contractor. The contractor that built the bridge is responsible for some of the snagging and initial repairs after the first year, then the responsibility for maintenance will be taken over by the other contractor that is looking after both the Queensferry crossing and the existing Forth road bridge. There are detailed costings around that and what is expected, but with a new bridge you would not expect there to be much maintenance cost involved.

I want to bring it right back to Colin Beattie’s question about what went well. You talk about the co-location of the contractors and the Forth replacement crossing authorities, if you like. I think that you say that that allowed quick decision making and a fluid exchange of ideas. Could that be replicated fairly easily on other projects? Is it part of the best practice that should be replicated going forward?

It will depend on the type of project. This one lent itself very well to that kind of set-up because the bridge was in one location. The site office was very close to the bridge, where all the construction was happening, and the benefit of that certainly came through strongly in our fieldwork when we spoke to all the people who were involved in the project, even without prompting. It helped that everyone was on the same site and was able to talk about issues as they arose. It meant that very good relationships could be built up within the FRC team as well as with the contractors.

The success of that set-up is certainly in the lessons learned for future projects, but it will depend on how the project is set up. The nature of the dualling of the A9 project, for example, means that it is quite difficult to transfer lessons that have been learned. The A9 covers a vast area, so it is not easy to transfer things like that. However, that project is transferring other aspects of lessons learned around education programmes and the wider stuff around involving schoolchildren and universities and getting people involved in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. People would certainly look to replicate that set-up if a project lent itself to that, but you cannot apply everything to some projects.

I have a wee supplementary, because that ties in with my question about the economic and employment impact.

Is one of the lessons that the bigger the contract that is let—particularly when, for example, steel is procured from China—the smaller the economic impact will be on the Scottish economy? First of all, the big contractors take their profits out of Scotland and do not reinvest here, because they are not based here. Secondly, steel, which was a substantial part of the contract, is procured from overseas. The dualling of the A9 is being done in much smaller chunks for obvious pragmatic reasons, but for local Scottish contractors and indigenous employees, the potential benefits of that, such as training opportunities or apprenticeships, might be much greater than they would be if it was a huge contract like the Forth bridge contract.

10:30  

I realise that it would be very difficult to build the Forth bridge in anything other than one contract, but are we doing enough to maximise the economic impact? I worry at times that we are just taking an accountant’s point of view of these contracts and looking at the immediate savings to the public purse. When we look at the wider economic and employment benefits that we have potentially foregone, we see that the public purse might be losing more than it could have gained.

I have to start by defending accountants and saying that we do not take a narrow view of just the immediate costs but instead look much more widely at what is being achieved. However, in broad terms you are right. Particularly at times when finance is tight, it is very easy to look at just the short-term cost and benefit of what one is trying to achieve, rather than the bigger picture.

We know that best-value criteria let people take account of wider benefits and not just the cost in pounds of a particular project or initiative. There is room for best-value criteria to be applied right the way up through the economic strategy in thinking about some of the wider trade-offs that are involved not only in procurement, but other investments and services such as lifelong learning, retraining for adults—those sorts of things.

It is something that the public sector is growing more aware of. Increasingly, Transport Scotland is looking at the extent to which subcontracting to local companies is taking place in some of its big projects and at things such as the number of apprentices that are being taken on as part of major capital projects.

I am thinking of Brexit. Obviously, there are restrictions on what we can do that are built into the Lisbon treaty and the like. Some European Union rules restrict how much preferential treatment we can give to local contractors, for example. Clearly, if those rules will no longer apply—we do not know yet whether they will after Brexit—there will be potential for enhancing the economic impact of procurement policies on the Scottish economy.

I would feel more comfortable responding to that if we had more of an idea about what might happen when we leave the EU, so I will leave it there.

Absolutely. I am an optimist.

I have a final question on good practice and the successes. From your report, are you able to identify whether there was simply a confluence of serendipity-—all the right things coming together at the right time in a wonderful coincidence—or can you say whether the project’s success was a function of some key individuals and, if so, who those individuals were? Was it a function of some good planning at the start by certain agencies? Were there any key things that happened that can be replicated? If you can identify individuals, can they be used further?

I will ask my colleagues to talk you through the handful of key things that people got right and which made a real difference. Although the project team got lucky on some aspects, such as inflation being low during the life of the contract, they also got unlucky on weather, which was worse than it had been in previous years. They had planned for the weather quite carefully. It certainly was not just serendipity.

I do not think that you could put your finger on a single point that made the difference. A number of factors were at play.

Paragraph 21 on page 18 has a list of bullet points indicating factors that are critical to the success of major projects. The first three points are about planning. Good planning is essential—we are all aware of the five Ps when it comes to planning. The final three bullet points are about how you determine your likely costs, the extent to which you allow optimism bias, how you get independent advice on your costs and how you compare your expected costs with other similar projects.

I would add leadership culture to that list. Leadership culture sets the tone for the entire project, and, as we have previously said, it is all about openness and transparency. It is all about willingness to discuss and negotiate problems, and all parties coming together. It is about people having clear responsibilities and there being governance arrangements in place to make sure that people are held to account for what they are doing.

Success was due to an accumulation of factors, but the fact that the bridge was such an iconic structure played a part. There was a genuine source of pride in the project and everyone working together to deliver the bridge.

If you were to push me, I would say that the project director came with a reputation that was highly thought of internationally, and he delivered.

Can I press you on that? That is the point that I wanted to get to. We see an awful lot of bodies in here—agencies rather individuals. In most cases, there is no doubt that leaders have been as invested as you just described and have had the desire for things to succeed, but for some reason they have not been able to deliver. How much was the impact of the project director key to the project’s success? Is it just about leadership?

It is difficult to quantify the overall influence. All that I can say is that he was well thought of and pulled the whole thing together. Everyone was working in conjunction and co-operation.

I think that you are trying to get to whether success is due to one person or one key thing. I do not think that it is. You could have all the good planning—the building blocks—in place and you could bring in an impressive person, but it could still go wrong if they do not have the right team under them, do not have the right costs or do not get the scope right. It is definitely a combination of all those things.

The page that Graeme Greenhill referred to at the start of part 2 is where we tried to get at some of the key success factors. Paragraph 23 summarises them. If you have all the good aspects of project management in place, that is a good start, but it was the additional things—getting the right people with the right skills, getting people in early, and having good leadership, openness, transparency, team spirit and working relationships—that made the project work well.

I have a final comment as an accountant—although I am not giving an accountant’s perspective. If the money aspect was good, that is good. However, if users matter, I should say that I have been through the whole construction phase as a user and I am a continuing user, and my experience has not been good. I do not expect you to comment on that; it is just my view.

We have to look at the project in the round. There are some real successes. We have made a criticism in the report in that we think that Transport Scotland could have kept people better informed about the need for further work after the bridge had opened, and I recognise that people’s expectations may have been for a bridge that removed congestion across the Forth, which was not one of the project’s objectives. I absolutely share your view that the user experience is an important part of this.

As members have no further questions, I thank the Auditor General and her colleagues for their evidence this morning. I now close the public part of the meeting.

10:38 Meeting continued in private until 11:02.