Chamber and committees

However, you cannot tell us today whether you are in favour of gas plants with CCS in Scotland.

Okay. As was mentioned, the Climate Change Committee made it clear that electricity needs to be affordable. What role does the Scottish Government have in ensuring that low-carbon electricity is also low-cost electricity?

Will ScotWind’s build-out make electricity prices go down?

I am looking at the round 6 contracts for difference—CFD—prices. The CFD price for Green Volt, a project that you know about, is £139 per megawatt hour, which is based on 2012 prices. Is it realistic that the build-out of ScotWind will drive down electricity bills for consumers across Scotland?

How would you make the auction rounds and contracts for difference more favourable for Scottish projects? Would it be done by increasing the price?

We will agree that it is clear from what the Climate Change Committee has said that we need to get electricity prices down.

I will be brief, too. My questions are on engineered removals. How confident is the Government that it can deliver technologies such as direct air carbon capture and storage? Do we need a plan B if they do not work as we want them to?

Mark Ruskell needs to remember when those InterCity trains were taken back up to Scotland to run for ScotRail—it was only about six years ago. We are miles behind other developed countries when it comes to intercity services, but I guess I should be thankful that my train was actually running.

During recess, I attended a convention in Inverness that was organised by community groups that were angry at the impact of major energy infrastructure. I got on the 6 pm train to get me back to Aberdeen, only for it to be cancelled because the air conditioning was not working. Simply opening the windows was not a good enough solution, and we were all told to wait for three and a half hours for the next train. There was no bus replacement service and no option to get on the warm train—we were just told to wait.

Outwith the central belt, our rolling stock is an embarrassment—something that the Government’s motion fails to acknowledge. The motion attempts to paint a rosy picture of rail services in Scotland, while the reality is that, in many parts of our country, the service falls way short of what is expected in a modern country and, in some parts, it is simply non-existent.

It could be far better—even the SNP knows that. Back in 2016, a few months before the Scottish Parliament elections, the SNP committed to spending £200 million to reduce journey times between Aberdeen and the central belt by 20 minutes by 2026.

Travellers hoped one day to travel the 120-mile route in about two hours; it was hoped that the only section of single track between Aberdeen and continental Europe at Usan might finally be dualled and that sections of the line might be straightened to make it faster. Nine years later, with approximately 5 per cent of the committed money spent, the people of the north-east can finally see what that announcement was—a pre-election gimmick by this rotten devolved Government.

In the north-east, we are getting used to the SNP’s broken promises. The £200 million rail improvement programme has gone the same way as the dualling of the A96 and the Alex Salmond commitment to dualling the A90 north of Ellon. The dualling of the A90 north of Ellon is important to many of my constituents, because rail services simply do not exist for many of them. In Aberdeen Donside, there is only one station; in Aberdeenshire East, there is only one station; and in Banffshire and Buchan Coast, there are no stations. I encourage the SNP members who would like to celebrate the removal of peak fares to spare a thought for many in the north-east who will not benefit one bit from this policy—it is central belt bias once again.

Rail services in the north-east could be improved. My colleague Liam Kerr has a petition to open stations at Cove and Newtonhill to the south of Aberdeen, but those calls seem to be falling on deaf ears as no support is forthcoming from the SNP Government. The excellent Campaign for North East Rail proposes new routes to Fraserburgh and Peterhead, which would unlock huge economic benefits for the north-east. Once again, those proposals have been met with a lukewarm reception from the SNP Government.

When it comes to rail, there are even more SNP broken promises. We were told that rail services would be decarbonised by 2035, but that has since been pushed back a decade and there seems to be very little detail, even for the new deadline. Our diesel trains will have to be replaced soon, and there will be no option but to replace them with other diesel trains—probably more hand-me-down trains from parts of the country that have got their act together and electrified.

I will also quickly mention Caledonian Sleeper. Two years after bringing it into public ownership, the question must be asked—what was the point? There are no new services, fares are not reduced, and its management team is still separate from ScotRail’s. The Caledonian Sleeper chief executive costs in the region of a quarter of a million pounds. More integration would have made sense. The change was made at the taxpayer’s expense, just to satisfy the egos and ideologies of the SNP.

Overall, ScotRail is running fewer trains than it did before Covid; decarbonisation has been pushed back a decade; ScotRail is running half-a-century-old trains; Caledonian sleeper prices have increased, as has the burden to the taxpayer; and the facilities on board ScotRail trains are miles behind where they should be. The promised £200 million for north-east rail improvements was a lie, and the SNP thinks that that is a cause for celebration.

As a Parliament, we have standing orders in place to support good governance. Therefore, the Scottish Conservatives intend to oppose this revision to the business programme, as it suspends the standing orders to subvert normal process, which I will expand on in tomorrow’s legislative consent motion debate after today’s motion inevitably passes.

Will the cabinet secretary give way?

I must admit that I enjoy taking part in a rail debate—I feel that I am a bit of a rail geek. I love the whole nostalgia of the railway, the history and the engines. My earliest memory of being on a train is as a young lad of about seven or eight years old. We had special tickets to go on the brand-new InterCity 125, which was going from Aberdeen to Aviemore. It was a special day trip to mark those new trains coming into service, and we got tickets only because one of our neighbours was a train driver—I felt really lucky.

Little did I know, however, that nearly 50 years later, those trains would still be in service in places such as Mexico, Nigeria and Scotland. The SNP espouses the value of net zero, yet it shamefully allows the situation in which we rely on those gas-guzzling hand-me-downs to connect our cities.

I was on one of those 50-year-old trains recently, with Russell Findlay. The sockets did not work—we mentioned it to the person on board, and he said, “Well, most of them don’t.” I do not think that the catering section on those trains has ever been open; it just takes up space. The trolley service was still offering the same old tired selection and the wifi was unusable.

If the SNP Government thinks that it is operating a world-class rail service, it is completely deluded. We are miles behind other developed countries.