Chamber and committees

The member fails to understand the fundamental point that I am making, which is about capital borrowing powers for this Parliament—the Scottish Parliament—in which the member sits and to which he should be contributing for the Scottish people.

I hope that all those who want, for the best of reasons, to hasten capital spending on projects such as road dualling will, equally, argue for increased borrowing powers to strengthen our capacity. If anyone else wants to intervene on that point, I am willing to take the intervention.

I would very much like the minister to address two questions in his summing up. First, will he outline the major impediments to publishing a timeline for completion of dualling the A9 and A96? Secondly, what is the current state of play regarding capital funding for the projects? Let us hope that we can get them back on the road to completion.

In fairness, will Liz Smith concede that the larger and more audacious and ambitious a project is, the more difficult it is to achieve accuracy at the point in time when the financial memorandum is produced? I know that from my business experience of delivering large-scale transformational programmes.

I am pleased to speak in this debate and to support my colleague Fergus Ewing’s call for an updated timeline for completion of dualling the A9. In him, the people of the Highlands have a great advocate and a persistent fighter on their behalf.

As has been acknowledged, it is still the case that too many lives are lost or damaged on Scotland’s roads—not least on the roads in question. I am sure that members are united in expressing our condolences to everyone who has been affected.

Whenever there are significant project delays, regardless of the reason for them, there are issues of trust and confidence. Further information always adds value, so I am very grateful for the minister’s earlier comments.

It is right to acknowledge all the work that has been done thus far. I am referring not only to the completion of some sections of the A9, but to the design and preparatory work that has been undertaken on all other sections that are due to be dualled, and the work on the Tomatin to Moy section—I have mentioned it previously and the minister mentioned it—which is due to be completed by 2025.

As someone who has, on occasion, travelled up the A9, I am very aware of the need to have a heightened sense of care as the road changes. No one thinks that the current stage of development is sufficient—hence the continuing commitment to complete that important work. However, we must remember that there have been huge problems with many large-scale projects in recent years as a result of the halting of so much project work because of the pandemic. I suspect that each and every MSP will, if we are honest, be able to point to delayed projects in their constituency.

There is an added financial problem, as the capital cost increases that result from inflationary pressures are compounded by supply chain problems. Such effects are very real and must be carefully addressed. Ignoring the context serves no one—least of all the people who are campaigning for projects to be completed. That is why I have regularly called for the Scottish Government to have full borrowing powers, rather than limited borrowing powers, to enable it to borrow to invest.

Recently, the UK Government has been very willing to happily borrow eye-watering sums, counted in the tens of billions, to bail it out of its own failures, while denying Scotland appropriate borrowing powers for critical capital investment. I hope that all those who want—

I sense that you want to come in, Hannah.

Ralph, do you have any final comments on that?

I note what you say about the change itself and the steady state, and the breaking down of the cost.

Emma, do you want to add anything?

Many of the areas that I wanted to probe have been covered by my colleagues. Mark Taylor, I quickly scanned through the Audit Scotland publication, “Radical Action needed on data”, which came out this morning. We are taking a top-down approach by looking at the financial memorandum of the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill, but I will look at it from the other side, where we know that we have issues around data. Are there any more general areas that pertain to our inquiry that you would like to pull out in the light of that paper?

In relation to that paper, I assume that you made that call because, as you have described it, the appetite for data as a mechanism of driving change in Government is variable. Is that due to constraints, or lack of resources or understanding of how important data is as enabler? What is your sense of that?

You make clear your concerns about unmet need in your written submission.

I will finish off on some of the themes that everybody has raised. We all agree that this is a framework or enabling bill, and that it involves a huge and highly complex transformational project, with huge uncertainty in all the variables. In addition, there is the approach of using secondary legislation, which has been raised.

Knowing what we now know, and setting aside parliamentary processes—we probably want to discuss those separately—does any of you want to bring out any final things that should have been in the financial memorandum, even if that was with an amber alert stating, “We suspect this, but we cannot know, for the extremely good reasons that we have set out.” Have we captured everything thus far, either in your submissions or in the questioning?

Are there any last comments from Ralph Roberts or Hannah Tweed?