Chamber and committees

Similar to what? I am not sure what you mean.

Yes.

Yes.

I will make no comment.

There were lots of sensitivities about the opening that I became aware of only afterwards—it is a sore point.

As I look at this from the perspective that I have now, some of the questions that the committee is posing are reasonable. That does not mean that there is anything sinister there. As a Government, we were desperately trying to find a path to meet a 2025 target. Obviously, the prospect and chances of doing that were diminishing with every month and year that passed, but we had not given up on doing so.

The 2014 date is significant because of the Office for National Statistics issue with the classification of NPD. That was not the point at which we had to consider a private finance option, as that was always a requirement; it was the point at which we had to effectively scrap the one that would have been the option and try to find another one, which took considerable work and time.

Then there was the period around 2018. As I think I said in response to the convener, if I look at the issue now, in hindsight, that is a point at which it is reasonable to at least pose the question about whether we should have been airing a bit more of this publicly. If I remember correctly, the original estimate for construction was about six years. By 2018, you are getting to the point at which, even if you have the finance procurement route settled, you are starting to get tight for a 2025 target.

If I was to go back to relive that period, I do not think that I have read anything that would make me think that there is something that we could have done to change things and to hit that target, but I would say that we should perhaps have been airing a lot more of the difficulties that we were in or the challenges that we were facing at that point a bit more openly. However, that is me applying hindsight.

I think that it is for the reasons that I have spoken about. Again, I say this with hindsight—that is one of the features of exercises such as this; we look at all these things from a different perspective. The 2025 target was always a massive mountain to climb, and to get to the summit by 2025 was going to require everything to go our way.

We then had certain things that did not go our way, such as the 2014 ONS issue, and austerity—I am not making a party-political point there; austerity put huge pressure on budgets. There was also Covid, which I have just spoken about. Those things were over and above the inherent complexities of the project around design, route selection, public consultation and environmental assessment—the project runs through a national park, and there are sites of historical significance. When we add on some unforeseen complexities, that is the reason why we are sitting here.

That does not make it easy or acceptable from the perspective of the Highlands, but nor does it equate to a situation in which the Government simply did not bother trying to progress the A9 project. We had significant commitment and drive behind it, but we encountered very significant challenges along the way.

This is where I will be candid with the committee. I have looked again—as you would expect me to do in advance of being here—at all the papers that I would have seen, and some that I did not, which I would not, as First Minister, routinely have seen at the time.

Before I say what I am about to say, I think that it is important not to sit here and say that there is nothing that we could have done to speed it up. It is important that there are processes to enable us to look back and really ask those hard questions. There will undoubtedly be points at which different decisions might have speeded things up to some extent.

Do I think that there is anything, in the context that we were, and that we came to be, dealing with, that we could have done that would have meant that the 2025 target turned out to be deliverable? My honest answer is no, I do not, because of the nature of the challenges with which we were confronted.

If I was First Minister then, is there something that I think that I could have done to meet that target? I genuinely do not. If I was First Minister now, which is not a prospect that I really like to contemplate, I would, I think, be confident—with all the caveats that one always has to add around major infrastructure projects—in the programme and the timeline that the Government has now set out.

I do not recall our having a discussion at the time about whether we should be airing more of it publicly, not because we were trying to hide it but because the work was still being done. The work was not at a point of conclusion, and therefore we would not have been at the point of making a ministerial statement about the end result.

As First Minister, you have an overview of every aspect of Government policy, and from time to time, you will be much more closely involved in certain aspects. As we got into 2020, I was consumed by something else rather large, but I would have been aware of the work that was under way, and certainly aware of the issues, because they were not peculiar to transport projects. We were aware of and concerned about the reclassification of NPD, because it had a potential knock-on effect on our capital programme.

I was obviously very aware—and this is pertinent to the A9—that we had no clear and obvious funding route for a period because of the NPD issue and because of the, frankly, very significant constraints on our capital budget. Those were issues that we were grappling with and trying to resolve. Inevitably, that takes you into a period in which a lot of the work seems to be internal to Government as we try to find the solutions. What it does not, in my view, equate to is a lack of focus and drive; it is just that we had a problem that we were desperately trying to find the solutions to, but the solutions were not easy to find.

I do not want to repeat everything that I have already said, but we ran into a period when we did not have obvious funding procurement routes, and much of the work that was being done was to resolve that.

On a more open point, given the considerable slippage in the 2025 timescale—which is what the committee is considering, in part, right now—it is important for the Government to look back, at an appropriate point, for the purpose of learning lessons for future projects, of whatever scale. Notwithstanding everything that I have said about the very real reasons that we were confronted with, which led to the delays that we are talking about, it is important to look back and ask ourselves, or for the Government to ask itself, whether there were points at which different decisions could have accelerated other sections of the route going into procurement more quickly. My saying that is not me sitting here saying that the answer to that is yes, but it would be reasonable to do an exercise—it would perhaps be unreasonable not to do it—that openly asked those questions so that we can learn appropriate lessons.