We move to item 3. The committee has received an update on major capital projects from the Scottish Government. Members will note that the update is in a new format, which is very detailed and quite interesting. The update lists the projects and gives some information about them. Our job is not to monitor or evaluate the progress on each individual project; it is more about process and whether there are any issues arising from that. Do members have any comments?
I welcome the new format. Given that I drive up and down the A9 most weeks—apart from in the winter, when I get the train—I would like to highlight that the A9 has disappeared. There is no A9.
How did you get down to Edinburgh this week then?
The A9 has disappeared from the major capital projects list. It has been in every such list since I joined the committee. I am aware that quite a lot of work is in progress on the A9 and that there are considerable plans to completely dual the A9, so I would welcome an update. This is the only time that the A9 has been missing from the list.
Okay. We can write and ask about that.
I am not sure that I welcome the new format. I am not quite sure what the point of it is, but it does not seem to monitor change.
The first part of the section—the new additional information—is a list of all the projects greater than £20 million; that is useful, although it is just a list. More important, it does not give us the information that we used to get on how the major projects have changed since the last time that they were reported on. I thought that the whole point was that we had a baseline position and we measured what is happening against that. I have been through the whole thing. The only comment that I could find that suggested any kind of change was on page 22, under “Kilmarnock Campus—Ayrshire College”, where it says:
“there has been slight slippage in reaching financial close”.
On page 23, under “V&A at Dundee”, it says:
“The project has been subject to some slippage due to movement of the proposed site”.
Those are the only mentions of change in the entire document. I do not understand. From memory, I think that the old document on the major projects told us the initial cost, the dates and any in-work changes to the projects. The new format seems to be an entirely backward step.
The document includes supposedly useful information under the heading “Contribution Made Towards Local Economic Development”, but the variation in information there is incredible. Some of the entries are detailed and helpful—they list the number of jobs and apprenticeships, procurement conditions and so on—but some of them have nothing of the sort.
The level of detail does not seem to depend on the size of the project. On one of the major projects—the Edinburgh to Glasgow improvement programme, on page 15—the document gives no detail whatever of what the impact would be. That is a £742 million project and we are told that it will “deliver enhanced connectivity”. There is nothing about jobs, apprenticeships or anything else.
The information is useful, but perhaps we have to evolve from this point. However, I would like to know the minimum amount of information that we expect, which can perhaps be supplemented by additional information. It strikes me as odd not to have any information, particularly on a project of that size.
It is difficult to believe what is happening in this document. I will give you an example. On page 24, under “Scottish Crime Campus”, it says:
“The full business case for the project outlined that it would cost £82 million and that practical completion would be achieved in autumn 2013, prior to the agencies becoming operational in the new building by April 2014. Practical completion of the project was completed on time and on budget in autumn 2013.”
That did not quite ring a bell with me, so I have just looked it up. On 14 April 2009, in a press release on the Scottish Government website about the Scottish crime campus, Kenny MacAskill said:
“The work is underway and I expect the campus to be operational by late 2011.”
It also says that the campus will cost £65 million.
In another press release in March 2010, under the heading
“Full steam ahead for crime campus”,
Mr MacAskill said:
“Subject to contract we expect the first agency to move into the campus in 2012 with full occupancy by mid-2013.”
It opened in February 2014.
I do not understand what this document does for us.
You raise a number of issues. On variations, it could be that there are only two projects where there are variations. However, those are legitimate questions to ask and we can write to the Scottish Government to ask for clarification, not only on the specific items that you mentioned but on the process issues about how information will be provided. I, too, hope that the process is evolutionary and that we are trying to improve it as we go along.
12:30
I will try to be brief. I think that you hit the mark perfectly, convener, because the updates report looks the way that it does because of an on-going dialogue between this committee and the Scottish Government. We have fed in a couple of times how we would like the figures to be presented. I think that you are right to say that that is an evolutionary process, which we can continue to engage in.
On whether things are on budget, I noted on page 13 of the report on the M8, M73 and M74 network improvements project that one area is under budget. I spotted another one that was under budget, too, but I cannot find where it is in the report at the moment.
Like Ken Macintosh, I am keen to know what we mean by the term “on budget”. Obviously, significant things can change during the lifetime of a project. If the budget was revised in 2012 or 2013, is the project on budget compared with the new baseline? In other words, if something was significantly revised in, say, January 2013 and it was completed in January 2014, and in that one-year period it was bang on budget for the new budget from January 2013—if committee members are still following me—but there was a realignment in the budget because of earlier events, should that always be flagged up in the latest report that we have?
I think that all the information is there and that it is merely a question of how it is presented in the progress report. I am nervous about the report getting a bit unwieldy. It is about information being presented in a sensible and focused manner.
As I suggested, we can write to the Scottish Government. We can also put on our agenda at some point a discussion with Audit Scotland to get some further analysis of how the progress report is being used.
I will pick up on two things that Bob Doris said. I do not quite follow the information about the M8, M73 and M74 project, because it suggests that the non-profit-distributing contract has reduced in value from £415 million to £310 million. The report says:
“The total cost of the project is estimated to be £435 million”.
That does not make clear to me what the total cost saving was.
That is one of the major projects, as is EGIP. I do not want to list all the major projects, but I hope that the committee will not ask the Government for comments on just the ones that I am picking out. On EGIP, the report states on page 15:
“The full business case has recently been published and outlines that the cost of the first phase of the programme is £742 million and ... The project is progressing on time and on budget.”
That does not even come close to summarising what has happened to EGIP. That project has gone through many different changes. As I remember, it was a report in a previous document that was presented to this committee that flagged up to Parliament that the project had been reduced by £350 million and stripped out so that it was no longer recognisable. That showed the very important contribution that the Parliament’s scrutiny of major projects makes to the spending of public money. In that case, we asked questions and turned the gaze of parliamentary scrutiny on to a huge sum of money.
Annie Gunner Logan said earlier that we ask people to jump through hoops to justify spending £20,000. However, although the EGIP project is worth £742 million, the report refers to it in only two sentences. I do not think that it is any help at all just to produce a list of projects—that is all that the report is—with no useful information that we can scrutinise. We know only that the projects are happening. That list of information will get in the way of our analysing what really matters, which is whether projects are being delivered in the way that it was said they would be delivered and are on schedule, using the same amount of money by the same vehicle, or whether they have been realigned. Those are the questions that we should be asking in a proper audit process.
My recollection is that the update reports in the past have broadly matched what we asked for at the time. This report does the same: it matches up with what we asked for. The committee does not micromanage or project manage the capital projects. If we think that we now need more and more detailed information, that is another matter. However, I think that the current update report broadly reflects what we have always asked for.
However, I suggest that what is missing is an indication of the contingency set-aside or spend. We asked at some point in the past for that to be included in the update report, because the issue came up in previous committee discussions. If members want more detail about the status of a piece of work, I would be quite happy to see that, too. However, that would mean that there would be more and more detail for us in the update reports, which is not their purpose.
The reply to the committee from Sir Peter Housden has a section on contingency. In our letter to the Scottish Government, I suggest that we ask for more clarification on all the broad issues as well as the specific issues that members have identified. We will also schedule a discussion with Audit Scotland about the way in which the update reports are being used.
I think that Ken Macintosh makes a reasonable point in relation to the M8, M73 and M74 network improvements project. During a previous discussion on the issue, I remember raising a point that I do not think is reflected in the project updates report. As well as there being development costs for the project, there can be other costs, such as land purchase costs. I asked where such costs would be accounted for. I am not saying that such costs are the reason for the gap to which Ken Macintosh referred. I asked for such information, but it has not been presented.
By and large, I think that the report presents pretty much what we have asked for. Perhaps the committee is getting a bit more sophisticated regarding the information that it wants. The second thing that I will put on the record—
It is not more sophisticated.
Bear with me, Mr Macintosh. The second thing is to confirm whether we have all the information that has been provided, because the project updates report could be a summary update of information and other information might already be in the public domain for us to access. If we choose to dig beneath the report that we have, the question is how quickly and easily we will find further information. Do we want such information in the summary, or do we want to be able to dig beneath the summary in a focused manner?
We are back to well-known questions. If the Government gives us too much information, we ask how we are to pick out the needle in the haystack; if the Government gives us focused information, we say that we are not getting enough information. It is about getting the balance right and the committee doing things in a collegiate way with the Government.
Okay. Is the suggested course of action agreed?
Members indicated agreement.
Thank you.
12:37 Meeting continued in private until 12:53.Previous
Section 23 Report