Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Official Report 490KB pdf

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Budget Strategy 2011-12

We resume with agenda item 3, which is a continuation of the evidence sessions that we have been having on the budget strategy. We will hear from representatives of regional transport partnerships and senior local authority transport professionals. I welcome Alex Macaulay, partnership director of the south east of Scotland transport partnership; David Duthie, partnership director of the Highlands and Islands transport partnership; and Jim Valentine, chair of the Society of Chief Officers of Transportation in Scotland. As I have done at the beginning of our two previous panels, I remind members that we are tight for time and that it would be helpful if questions and answers were kept as succinct as possible.

I begin with a general question. How large a reduction in annual budgets do local authority transport departments and RTPs expect that they might face over the next few years?

A problem that we have had is that, although the Scottish budget has grown over the years, the maintenance budget has dropped slightly from the 2005 level that Dave Duthie talked about.

The SCOTS national survey results, which have just come out, show a shortfall of about £45 million in what we need to invest to stand still at the 2009 level. That could be regarded as a saving of £45 million, but over the next 10 years it translates into a cost of about £500 million. We need to invest £1 billion during the next 10 years just to keep the transport network where it is, and most people would agree that the network is not in a good state.

When we start to hit maintenance budgets, we will see that—as the winter and the volcano showed—the transport network is extremely vulnerable and fragile. Maintenance levels can be run down for a certain time, but we will reach a point at which, when something happens, we are not able to respond quickly and bring the maintenance level back up quickly.

To respond to your question, convener, SCOTS took advice from the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. We are trying to follow the line that those organisations have taken, so we are looking at reductions of between 12 and 20 per cent. The scenarios that I am talking about work to those models.

Dr Goudie said in his paper that during the next 13 to 15 years we are likely to lose £25 billion to £35 billion of public sector spending in Scotland. Of course, that is the amount of spending that would get us back to 2009-10 levels, but if we had not had the recession, we would have expected the budget to grow from its 2009-10 level as the economy grew. The national picture is sobering.

I remind the committee of a couple of facts that I mentioned on a previous occasion when I gave evidence to the committee. First, since November 2007, when local authorities inherited the regional transport partnerships budget, the authorities in my partnership area have been spending only 42 per cent of that inherited budget on regional transport budgets—and that started before the problems in the economy in relation to which Dr Goudie made his projections. Secondly, I remind the committee that spending on active and sustainable travel in the SEStran area has gone down from £2.3 million in 2006-07 to £0.45 million in 2009-10.

According to the national projections, there will be a reduction in public sector expenditure in Scotland of roughly 12 per cent over the next three years, but behind those projections are projected cuts of 43 per cent in capital departmental expenditure levels over the same three-year period—the revenue element will be nearer to 8 per cent. That is on top of the investment that SEStran has lost during the past couple of years, which I mentioned. Dave Duthie talked about how transport is a soft target for cuts. In general, transport investment is and has historically been very dependent on capital, so under the current projections we are facing substantial cuts in transport spending.

In discussion with the Scottish Futures Trust and others, SCOTS has looked at the various models that are coming forward from authorities, individually and collectively, and considered how we can deal with things such as the infrastructure backlog. However, we need to link that back clearly to the Government’s national outcomes and remember that transport is included. It is crucial to achieving those outcomes because it is the lifeblood that holds everything together.

I heard what my colleagues said about capital investment, but the maintenance of what we already have in place must be our priority. We must not lose that by investing in capital projects.

I agree that we must keep the network that we have in place, but we must also consider where we can find new funding, other than from the Government, to make things happen. Most of the RTPs, including HITRANS and SEStran, have been successful in using funding that has historically come through Government and local authorities to gain European funding to develop services. The difficulty is that, as budgets are squeezed, it is sometimes difficult to get the core funding that is required to enable European funding to happen, particularly when maintenance becomes such a priority. In two projects on which we are working, European investment represents 60 per cent of the total cost, but we still have to find the other 40 per cent. I foresee that it will become more and more difficult to do that. It might be useful for the Government to consider whether it can prime funding for such efforts.

Europe tends to work on a regional basis, so we look for regional partners to develop transportation. We have used European funding to improve links between our hubs and the areas that they serve and to improve real-time information on bus services. Those have knock-on benefits for not just tourists and others who come into the area but people who live there.

We are looking to meet the Government’s environmental targets and increase the use of public transport, but we must recognise that that will not happen magically and that we need to do things to make it happen. Some capital investment will be required to make people more confident about using public transport as an alternative to the private car.

I reiterate the point about European funding. I have made the point to the committee before that it would be nice to have a European fund to which we could bid for match funding.

Many of the potentially attractive avenues that are available to local government, such as tax incremental financing, are not available to regional transport partnerships because we are not council-tax-collecting bodies. The only option that is open to regional transport partnerships is to try to get more money in from Europe. It is becoming increasingly difficult for our partner local authorities to find the match funding. I want to know where Dave Duthie got 60 per cent, because so far the best that I have managed to get out of Europe is 50 per cent. It is certainly becoming increasingly difficult for local authorities to find that match funding.



16:15

There are certainly savings to be made, but I do not think that there is a one-size-fits-all model. At the moment there are a number of different models that include, for example, significant national projects such as the road conditions survey and SCOTS’s asset management project; the Tayside Contracts model, in which a contracting arm supplies three councils; and the Ayrshire models. Different local authorities will have different priorities and the issue is to align those priorities with the model that can be put in place. It would be difficult to have one model that you could take to a single local authority or group of authorities and say, “This will work here.” As I know from my own authority, finding the right model requires a lot of negotiation and compromise, but you can get there. The fact is that these models can deliver big savings, but we have still some way to go to ensure that local authorities make maximum use of RTPs and the benefits that they can bring to bigger projects.

The issue needs to be considered. During the winter, for example, SCOTS, SOLACE, the Scottish Government and Transport Scotland managed to work together very well to deal with the salt crisis, and it was a good way of building bridges. Indeed, once you start working together, you begin to see other opportunities at both management and operational level. After all, there must be duplication of effort and in back-office support in certain areas. The only way we might be able to keep specialist teams in, say, accident investigation and prevention, hydrology or ground investigation in-house and retain such specialist knowledge at a local level might be through working with other agencies or bodies.

Historically, councils and those in central Government worked closely on trunk road maintenance and in areas with which Jim Valentine is involved there is a close and useful relationship with the contractor that supplies services. There are certainly benefits to be had in other areas. For example, the trunk road that runs through the centre of Skye up to Uig is maintained by the contractor while all the other roads are maintained by the council. However, the council still has to drive along the trunk road to get to services, and the kind of approach that we are talking about might provide opportunities in that respect.

The provision of ferry services might also benefit. In the next few months, the Scottish ferries review will publish its recommendations and the conclusions of its consultation, but a point that I will make is that ferries, which operate at a local and national level, are a lifeline service. That phrase is often misused, but it is appropriate for ferry services; the fact is that people cannot live on the islands without the ferry. We need to recognise that cuts made in those services will have an impact on every other service and, indeed, on the viability of island communities. At the moment, some island communities, particularly on Orkney and Shetland, are having real problems maintaining their services and those problems will become huge if budgets are cut. The issue will have to be considered at a more national level if we are to find solutions that maintain services on the ground.

I raised the issue in reply to an earlier question. We are talking about powers rather than duties but, being realistic, I think that we need to accept that councils have to provide education, care for the elderly and other maintenance services. There will be issues for public transport, but a parallel issue to consider is support from the third sector, particularly with regard to community transport. As budgets are cut and public transport services are reduced—something that is bound to happen—there will be more of a reliance on the third sector to fill the gap and provide access to health care and shopping and help to meet people’s basic needs. As a result, the third sector will be significantly challenged and, if councils do not support it, there will be a major impact, particularly in more rural areas. Cities have core commercial bus services that allow most people—although perhaps not those who have access challenges—to get about. The issue will become quite significant in rural areas and I worry that in such areas public transport services will use only the key corridors and the roads used on school runs.

I want to talk about the maintenance budget for local roads. Before I do so, I have a question for Alex Macaulay. He argued that we should spend money through transport partnerships. If we did that, how would we deal with ferries, trunk roads and so on? Are we not talking about the same amount of money, merely delivered by someone else?

That was not my point. I was referring to the fact that, in local authority budgets, the transport budget is not ring fenced. There is evidence that that budget is being diverted to fund other services. The budget for lifeline ferry services and trunk roads is already completely within the Government’s control and is allocated directly to Transport Scotland, so I was not talking about that issue. There is an argument that those budgets will be under pressure as well, but the mechanism already exists for Government to manage that.



16:30

Okay. I take your point. Whether the ability to manage the cuts that we have discussed is greater in central Government, local government or transport partnerships is another issue.

David Duthie talked about councils using trunk roads to get to places to provide services. That happens throughout the Highlands—the A9 is an example. It seems that the level of maintenance of the trunk roads has enabled them to survive the winter a lot better. If the method that is used for maintaining the local roads infrastructure is not improved—if roads are merely patched—it will not work. Do we need a different form of road maintenance best practice when it comes to dealing with potholes and so on?

The absolutely safe answer is that we will tell you next year once we have done our road condition survey. Many people have speculated about the amount of work required but, once the survey goes round over the summer and we get the results back in early next year, we will be able to give an accurate figure.

I had the pleasure of giving evidence to the committee for its inquiry into active travel. I repeated that evidence in writing to you for today’s meeting, so I will not go into detail on it. However, the committee should be quite clear about where I am coming from. I think that I am quoted in your report as saying that it is a no-brainer that we should invest more in active travel. I am still of that opinion. The health, environmental, social and value-for-money benefits of investing in active travel in general are significantly higher than the benefits that would be achieved from major infrastructure investment. Given that budgets are very tight and the significance of what can be achieved with active travel for relatively modest budget increases, we should invest more in active travel. However, my fear is that we will not do that, because it is an easy target. I have already said that transport is an easy target in times of budget stringency and, sadly, active travel is an easy target in transport budgets in such times. It will take a policy lead from the Scottish Government to turn that on its head. Having said that, the budgetary implications of increasing investment in active travel are not major, and an awful lot can be achieved for relatively modest investment.

I will include the other part of our remit. We have allocated about £100,000 to urban cycle networks. Again, that will be spent on the basis of 50 per cent match funding.

We are active in seeking European funding—just last week, we were successful in getting European funding for rolling out real-time passenger information in Fife, having already had some success in that regard in East Lothian and Scottish Borders.

We are pursuing a number of European projects. We have been successful in getting European funding at 50 per cent level for a dry port initiative in our area, and we have submitted another four European funding applications in partnership with the private sector, with the match funding coming from private sector partners rather than local authority partners in cases where the local authority partners’ budgets are under severe pressure.

By attracting European funding, we are increasingly seeking to get effectively double the delivery for the amount of investment that goes in from either the public sector or the private sector. We are doing our best in that regard, and have been quite successful so far.

We ask major employers to provide green travel plans, but we have heard evidence that they are not actively monitored. Do you think that investment of time and effort in ensuring the proper implementation of private sector travel plans that were granted planning permission would be effective?

What are the panel members’ views on the long-term financial sustainability of the national concessionary travel scheme? Do any of the panel members have any proposals for changes that might be necessary, given the financial settlement that we are now facing?

I have nothing to add.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Some elements of capital infrastructure investment can wait, but some cannot, simply because of the deterioration of the asset that the Government seeks to upgrade. Certainly, from my experience of previous budget cutbacks, we must look very carefully at the capital investment programme to identify elements that are not essential for the on-going business of the country or of a region, albeit that those elements may have a very good economic rate of return and so on.

We should also bear in mind the estimate of a 40 per cent-plus reduction over the next three years in available capital spend. Collectively, as a country, we will have to look very carefully in the coming years at planned capital investment in infrastructure.

Thank you all very much for giving your time to answer our questions. That brings us to the end of today’s agenda. We will take further oral evidence on the budget strategy, including from the minister, at the next meeting. I ask members to come to that meeting 15 minutes early so that we can discuss the approach to questioning. If they could be here for half-past one next week, that would be appreciated.

Meeting closed at 17:00.

That phenomenon might be much longer term than the short-term budget squeeze will be.

Yes.

You all touched on what might be done and how we might respond. What lessons can we learn from previous cuts in transport budgets—for example, on changing priorities, reprofiling the order of work on various projects, or looking at innovative new sources of finance to supplement public sector spend in the area?

At last week’s SCOTS conference, we asked members about what was out there and what could be done better. After all, we are all in the same boat. The organisation will be looking again at whether we need to take forward national projects or whether we need to look at what can be done at regional or subregional level and will hope to facilitate the process.

Dave Duthie keeps stealing my thunder. I was about to say that the SEStran submission refers to demand-responsive transport.

There could well be a case for procuring bus services that are supported across boundaries, either through amalgamations of local authorities or the mechanism of RTPs. That said, other functions that follow from that will make it quite difficult for smaller authorities to do that work cost-effectively but, in any case, I reiterate Dave Duthie’s point that shared services will not be enough to meet the stringencies of the projected budget deficits.

Given that the vast majority of local authority funding is not ring fenced, will transport suffer greater budget reductions than other local authority functions such as education and social work? I know that you have touched on the impact of any unreasonable or disproportionate reductions in the transport budget, but you might wish to expand on your earlier comments.

David Duthie mentioned community transport. I am interested in the difference that demand-responsive transport might make, perhaps when there is less money around, to the villages that I represent and many other rural areas, where there are bits and pieces of transport. How might those be combined to provide a good, cost-effective service to my communities and others?

You have raised several issues. First, aside from the trunk roads, the great majority of roads in Scotland’s road network have evolved from cart tracks. Many roads on the network have multiple surface dressings that have built up over the years and which, in periods of bad weather, fall apart fairly quickly. The majority of the trunk roads, bar one or two, have been designed and properly built. That is why the trunk roads have a degree of robustness. It is probably true that a disproportionate amount of funding goes to the national road network, but given that the vast majority of traffic travels on that network, there is good reason for that.

Because of the different types of network that we are dealing with, using the same practice is possible only on the main roads. It might be possible to share maintenance best practice on principal roads and trunk roads, but a different code of practice and different maintenance standards are needed for streets and minor roads. We could argue about whether the existing standards are right or wrong. Over the years, we have drifted away from them, as we have tried to make do and mend. Patching, if it is done correctly, will last some time but, in some areas, in the haste to get a road open because it is needed for the next morning, a very quick repair will be done. If the patch comes out, someone will have to do a permanent repair over a Sunday night, for example. What the public sees are quick temporary repairs that do not last, but until the funding issue is dealt with, patching is all that will be done. I do not think that many authorities are doing reconstruction or overlays.

I will just respond to what Alex Macaulay said earlier about RTPs taking control of the road budget. That might sound like a good model and it would have certain advantages, but the joining up of services would be lost. There would be a disconnect in the delivery of services. We would run the risk that transport might just become a parallel stream rather than being integrated with the social care and education agendas and so on.

I hope not. I think that I said that we did not see any advantage in road maintenance being taken into a central management structure. There would be no real advantage in roads in Orkney and the Western Isles being maintained in the same way as roads in the south of Argyll.

However, there could be a requirement to deal with the backlog, as there are roads where the asset is reducing in value. The people who maintain the trunk road network get money on the basis of the improvement that they make to the asset, so their funding is very much geared towards what they have to achieve. That does not happen on the local authority side—local authorities do not get the same level of funding and the assets are getting worse.

When I came into roads in the early 70s, the largest vehicles on the road were 24-tonne, twin-axle vehicles. We did not get the large vehicles that we have now, particularly in forestry in the Highlands and Aberdeenshire. They do such significant damage to roads that were not designed to take them that councils cannot afford to maintain the roads. The worry is that, in forestry, extraction is happening at a greater rate, and councils will find it very difficult to maintain the load capacity on those roads and may have to apply restrictions to keep them safe for the general public. That will have a massive impact on the forestry sector as a whole.





All sorts of issues are built into road maintenance. Overlaying before you get to the stage of having to do major work is both best practice and the cheapest way of doing it overall. If councils are spending so much of their money filling potholes just so that the road survives, they will not have the money to do the long-term maintenance, which is what should be done. It is a no-win situation at the moment.

I will follow up Rob Gibson’s question. What impact has the much higher than average expenditure on gritting and other winter maintenance this year had on transport budgets? What are the implications of that?

Oh, yes.

The committee has carried out an active travel inquiry. I am interested in the panel’s views on the future funding of walking and cycling infrastructure developments and related programmes. What are the implications of the stretching of transport budgets? Will such programmes be abandoned, or is there an opportunity to develop them?

The subject of my next question has been covered a wee bit already. What impact could budget reductions have on local authorities’ ability to support socially necessary bus services that are not commercially viable?

In the SWESTRANS recent retenders, contracts have come in 100 per cent higher than in the previous round of tendering. That shows the level of pressure. About 85 per cent of the SWESTRANS bus network is subsidised, as it is very much within a rural area. The situation in other areas of Scotland are perhaps not as extreme in that regard, but the same problems arise.

In SEStran, we have embarked on a comprehensive review of public transport, demand-responsive transport, community transport and other social transport for the East Lothian area. The western part of East Lothian has a very good bus service, but the eastern part has a very poor one because it is a dispersed rural community. We are trying to achieve a trunk-and-branch approach there, in which demand-responsive transport would be available to get people from the remote rural communities to hubs for the main, conventional bus services. Demand-responsive transport would not bring them all the way into Edinburgh; it would bring them to a hub from where they would take regular public transport.

There is a very good example of that approach in Lincolnshire, where demand-responsive transport is used as a mechanism to replace conventionally tendered and supported services. I cannot advise the committee about how successful the East Lothian approach will be, as we are currently in the middle of the study. However, I am quite hopeful that we can get the right combination of services that will be beneficial to the local authorities and assist them to achieve the level of supported services that they need to supply. If we can make that approach work in East Lothian, we would hope to make it work elsewhere and share that experience with colleagues in other RTPs.

I am still keen to know whether there are examples of how you—or others—are reacting to what is ahead. You may wish the transport budget to be protected, but no budget will be protected from what is going to hit over the next couple of years. Asking for the transport budget to be protected sounds a bit like special pleading. I am sure that members of any parliamentary committee will hear such requests. However, the reality is that changes will have to be made. Are those changes beginning to filter through, or is that not happening?

They are filtering through in my own authority. About £130,000 in our business plan for the current financial year has been allocated to sustainable transport initiatives. We tend to do that work on a match funding basis—we seek match funding from health boards, universities, major employers, local authorities—

HITRANS sees a potential opportunity for gaining benefit from the private sector in terms of active travel. We have carried out active travel audits of all our key settlements in which we have identified people’s walking and cycling movements in communities. That forms a layer in the local plan, which means that developers do not simply build housing but have to think about how it links into that layer and whether they can perhaps contribute to developing such infrastructure. That is where it is possible to make gains. I appreciate that development is not going to be as strong as it was until recently, but people will still develop, which means that we will still be able to get benefits from focusing the investment that is coming out of development in the areas where it makes a difference. Regional transport partnerships can become involved in that respect.

We have worked on travel planning with our partner councils and others in the public sector, and offer grants to the councils if they will match fund activity to improve modal shift and encourage people to walk, cycle or take public transport.

There are things that we can do, but we have limited budgets with which to do them.

As members will know, the Scottish Government recently carried out a review of the concessionary travel scheme, as a result of which levels of payment per passenger to the bus companies have gone down. We need that to bed in for a wee while and to see the reaction to it and how it performs before we start to make any radical changes. However, the concessionary travel scheme will undoubtedly continue to be under pressure financially—even more so given the budget projections that we face.

I will give the committee an anecdotal piece of evidence, if members will bear with me. I have a travel pass, but I do not need one. As I can afford to pay for a bus or train fare—I acknowledge that train fares are not covered by the pass—I simply ask whether the travel pass should be a universal age-related benefit, or whether there should be some form of means testing, which is a phrase I hate to use. The issue is not confined to transport, because it seems to me that we need to ask such questions about various elements of social support in Scotland. I do not know the answer, and it will be a difficult one for politicians to address. However, we need to ask whether such services should remain universal.

We are all probably just waiting to see what comes out the far end, given the financial constraints that we will face. If the Forth crossing goes ahead, will it be the only project that does? What will happen to the dualling of the A9 and other projects? The question is whether work on major pieces of Scottish infrastructure should be held in abeyance until definite priorities are agreed. I do not know the answer. My colleagues may have different views.

To put the matter in context, Dr Goudie referred to a total cut in the Scottish budget of £35 billion. We can see the Government’s difficulty in managing the funding of the Forth crossing from its current budgets. The budget reduction over the next 13 years is equivalent to the cost of building a Forth bridge every year for the next 13 years, so the reduction will have a huge impact on budgets and a major impact on capital expenditure across all sectors. The question is what on earth we can do outwith the core projects, which I accept we must progress. However, beyond that, we will have real problems.

A paper was published last week by Dr Andrew Goudie that identified where the overall budget reductions are liable to be made in the next 10 to 12 years. Those reductions are significant—we are potentially looking at a reduction in the current state budget, over that period, of between £25 billion and £35 billion. That will have a major impact across all services, and transport will have to take its share of that. You question is how much of that reduction will be taken by local authorities and the transport sector. Major parts of the transport network—trunk roads, rail and ferries—are developed by Transport Scotland and the Government. Those are the key elements in terms of national services; the issue is how the local elements will be delivered.

Councils will be given lumps of money during that period in support from the Government. They have statutory duties to perform, which prescribe what they have to do on the ground, and they have powers to do other things. For example, councils have a duty to maintain roads. They do not have a duty to provide public transport—they have a power. When money gets tight, the concern will be the extent to which councils can maintain the areas in which they have powers rather than duties. The proposed reduction that has been worked out by Dr Goudie suggests that, in about 2014-15, we should go back to the budget levels that we had in 2005-06, or their equivalent now. Back then, local authority budgets for transportation were not too bad, but the demands in other sectors have increased since then and the choice for local authorities will be whether they try to reduce the areas in which they have made commitments to 2005-06 levels, whether they make cuts across the board, or whether they make disproportionate cuts in transport spending. Unfortunately, I do not know the answer to that, but perhaps I have set the stage for my colleague, Jim Valentine, who has direct control of a transport budget. As a model 1 RTP, we do not deliver services directly on the ground.

The recent increases in oil prices will have a disproportionate impact on future transport budgets in general, not only through the price of fuel but through the price of road-making materials. The transport budget tends to take such hits internally and the issue is not really taken account of in the overall budget distribution. I suspect that that impact will continue for a considerable time, and that the effect on services on the ground is liable to be greater than would be expected if we simply considered the money in the budget.

Many local authorities are considering shared services. Can any savings be made by additional joint working between individual local authority transport departments and RTPs on service provision or procurement? If so, how might we realise them?

The road conditions survey and the asset management project have been under way for some time now. Are you actively exploring any new initiatives?

Speaking from a Highlands and Islands perspective, I do not think that there is much point in having the person who organises road maintenance in the Western Isles and Orkney do the same in Argyll. I am not sure that that kind of close working actually works, although I suppose that one could work together in developing the same systems.

That said, there are certain areas—for example, the provision of real-time bus information—where individual councils might well not be able to develop the expertise required for delivery. In such cases, councils might be able to work together and learn from each other through, say, one of the councils getting the expertise and the others buying into it. The question then is whether the benefit is delivered through councils or naturally through the RTPs.

Another area is demand-responsive transport, which Strathclyde partnership for transport is considering for the Clyde valley and is thinking of extending to deal with issues such as access to health transport. Those kinds of areas might benefit from not only councils but different sectors working together because, after all, transport covers many elements other than public transport. There are gains to be made, particularly if we maximise the use of, say, taxis and minibuses rather than buses at regional as well as national level. However, I do not think that such moves on their own are enough to deal with the budget issues that we face.

Before we move on, I would like to look at the other side of the coin. Can we make any savings through greater integration of national agencies and organisations?

I have already provided some examples of the kind of disproportionate cuts that transport in the SEStran area has already suffered. We all know why that is; money has simply been diverted to other pressing social services.



The cuts have also happened because local authority budgets are not ring fenced. The concordat has been in place for only two and a half years. We should not rip it up and throw it in the bin, because many good things are associated with it. However, transport is recognised generally as a key influence on the recovery of the economy. Connectivity, accessibility and the ability to get to where you need to be to do business are fundamental. If transport is to play its part in the economy’s recovery from this recession, transport budgets will need to be protected somehow.

One way of doing that is to rethink the way in which we fund transport and to do so through the transport partnerships, which are single-function authorities that cannot spend their money on anything other than transport. If the Government thinks that transport is worthy of protection, one way of protecting it is to fund it through the transport partnerships. That would not breach the concordat or the principle of non-ring fencing of local authority budgets. Funding would simply be provided to another element of the public sector—the regional transport partnerships.

We are getting to a position in which transport will be under severe pressure. If the Government decides that that is okay and sets priorities elsewhere—there are indications both nationally and in Scotland that priorities lie elsewhere, in social services—that is fair enough and all of us must live with it. However, if the Government believes that transport is important, it needs to provide a degree of protection to transport budgets that they do not enjoy at present.

The third sector is looking at that option. Because of the threats to budgets, the community transport organisations are looking at providing a level of public transport, rather than specialist transport. DRT is the way in which to do that. If someone wanted to travel between two points, instead of trying to find out what was available, they would contact a supplier, who would arrange transport for them. That optimises use of the transport that is available.

The other opportunity is to look at all the transport that is available—school transport, social work transport and health service transport, through the Scottish Ambulance Service. There are ways of bringing all that transport together. I mentioned that SPT has examined the option. SPT has not yet implemented it on the ground, but it offers a significant opportunity to maximise the use of what is available and to provide access to the people who are most vulnerable and have no access by other means. The key is to ensure that the community transport sector has core funding. Such funding can be provided in two ways—either directly to the sector or in return for supplying services to get people from A to B.

It seems that we have opened up a disagreement between local authority and transport partnership representatives. David Duthie might widen that gap.

So, in this tight budget situation, should we look at the code of practice, which Jim Valentine talked about being honoured in the breach, and review the way in which money is apportioned between the national road network and local councils?

Yes, but to go back to what I said, you would also have to look at where the traffic has been generated and what the purpose of the road is. Most local authorities tend to prioritise their maintenance anyway, in that lightly trafficked urban streets will require, and will get, less maintenance than higher-trafficked principal roads.

We have talked about roads but we have not talked about footways. In an urban situation, footways are a big issue. All the figures that I cited earlier do not include footways, street lighting and so on.

Just to wrap up on the effects of the severe winter weather, I do not want you to go into the detail—we have already had that—but, given the order of magnitude of the budgets, how much work that requires to be done has this harsh winter thrown up?

We move on to questions from Cathy Peattie. So that we can fit in all the questions that we intend to ask, it would be helpful if questions and answers were kept as brief as possible.

There is no doubt that the cost of gritting was higher, but different councils will deal with that in different ways. Some councils have dipped into their reserves and others may have taken the money out of other pots. I cannot say accurately what the effect on transport budgets is at this time.

You were looking at increased effects.

I am sure that Alex Macaulay will come in as he has particular enthusiasm for this area.

Sustrans is still getting some budget from the Government to allow it to develop the national cycling work, so things are still happening on that front. As an RTP, we have tended to concentrate more on walking and cycling around communities rather than on the long, national networks. There is perhaps a need for us to review how we encourage people on to bikes. We see cycling and walking as a means of getting from point A to point B rather than as an activity in its own right. There is, of course, the health benefit of cycling, but if we could perhaps focus as much on developing cycle routes in towns and communities as on having a national network, we might gain more in terms of modal shift and people taking up the active travel option.

There will definitely be an impact. Like Dave Duthie, I fear that it will hit social inclusion and education. However, much will depend on where the cuts fall and on whether we can provide services in other ways, working with our community planning partners and the health service. There are opportunities for such work. Some authorities have had good success in working with major employers on routes on certain city streets, which releases cash elsewhere. In general, however, the subsidised rural network will be most at risk.

I can confirm that. The south-west of Scotland transport partnership’s written evidence to the committee indicates that it has put many of its bus contracts out to tender recently. The costs of the tenders that have come back have been substantially higher than previously. Obviously, the costs of running the services are increasing, so that puts pressure on local bus services. I was formerly in charge of transport in a council, and my experience was that cuts in public transport can have a major impact on communities and can cause a community reaction. I agree that education, health and other sectors are very important. However, if we get to the stage of people being unable to get out their door and go anywhere, there may be a reaction from the ground that might refocus priorities. That issue is not acknowledged at the moment because we have not quite got to that stage, but it will come.

16:45

When Alex Macaulay talked about active travel, he said that we should invest more in it. I am keen to look at the other side of that. In other words, where should we invest less? I appreciate Mr Macaulay’s point, but we all know that there will be large budget cuts. I acknowledge that the committee said in its report on active travel that national Government must take a lead. However, the RTPs also have strategies and priorities. Are there examples of good practice whereby RTPs have changed their priorities and looked at investing more—or less—to deal with the current circumstances?

The SEStran approach since November 2007 is possibly unique. It involves the local authorities being completely responsible for the provision of transport capital investment in their own area. We do not call that money into SEStran, then redistribute it. The local authorities have total autonomy over that money. In general, SEStran addresses the areas that our local authority colleagues find themselves unable to address. One of those areas is active travel. A significant budgetary allowance of about 20 per cent of our available regional transport strategy implementation budget has been allocated to active and sustainable travel initiatives. We are doing our best within a fairly limited budget environment. However, let me be clear that the local authorities have total autonomy in relation to how they choose to spend on transport investment.

I stress that I am talking now not just about active travel but about your whole remit. Are you looking at how things are changing?

My experience is that green travel plans can be successful if they are actively monitored and if the occupier of the building comes on board with the local authority, the regional transport partnerships or whoever.

Most local authorities are effectively deconstructing their budgets at the moment because they cannot make enough efficiency savings. As was said earlier, they are examining their core business, the single outcome agreement outcomes and the local outcomes and rebuilding their budgets around them.

We all recognise the huge benefits that the national concessionary travel scheme has brought to the people who are entitled to use it, and we should all applaud that. The difficulty is that it is becoming an expensive scheme to maintain. We are starting to look at the issue in the Highlands and Islands and intend to do some research on it. We have had some internal discussions, and hope that we can come up with something that all the councils in our area can sign up to as being best practice in the rural situation.

The concessionary travel scheme, which is a bus-related scheme, is fine if there are lots of buses about but, as we have heard, there are fewer buses in rural areas, which means that the scheme’s benefits to the rural community are not as great as its benefits to people in an urban area. However, there are no benefits to people who use ferries, which, in rural areas, are the equivalent of the bus.

We are not looking for more money—we understand that the budget might have to be reduced—but we want to ensure that what we are doing is having the most effect in terms of the fundamental issues, which involve giving people access to hospitals and the other services that are part of people’s normal lives.

As I said, we are actively considering the matter and hope to come back to Government with a proposal. At the moment, however, I would not like to say what the changes might need to be.

What will be the impact of the Scottish Government’s transport capital expenditure priorities—for example, the Forth crossing and the Aberdeen western peripheral route, which are large-scale capital infrastructure projects—on our capacity to deliver other capital projects, whether in the transport sector or elsewhere?