Chamber and committees

I support Mr Golden’s suggestions, but will add one inquiry that should be made, although I am not quite sure of whom. Obviously, we have legislation on sprinklers in domestic flats—I think that that was introduced pre-Covid, around 2018. It has been drawn to my attention by a constituent of mine who is a builder or renovator of flats that, at that time, the estimated costs that were given for installing sprinklers were very modest. He told me that, for various practical reasons, those costs have risen astronomically such that, in his instance, they might even make the construction of flats unviable.

I thought that I would mention that because, if costs have risen several times—not just by £1,000 or £2,000, but by huge amounts—and we are to pursue the proposal, at an early stage we would need somewhere to get advice from about the costs to kennels and other establishments that Mr Golden mentioned. I thought that I should throw that in out of fairness and balance.

Just last week, I got a quite alarming letter from a constituent. We all want safety, but would a £100 smoke detector be as effective? That was his argument, rightly or wrongly. I voted to pass the sprinkler legislation, but it has turned out to be grossly more expensive than was estimated at the time.

Precisely. That was helpful.

I support Mr Torrance’s recommendation. I will add something that is hot off the press and has arisen since the papers were provided to us for this meeting. Last Friday, in response to an inspired question, the Scottish Government noted that a new depopulation action plan has been published, which contains an apparent new approach to be taken to areas with chronic depopulation, notably parts of the remote Highlands—although one is not allowed to call remote areas remote any longer, apparently—and Islands. The plan says that the approach will be

“local by default, national by agreement”,

which suggests to me that local decisions will prevail, unless I am missing something.

I raise that because I wonder whether the clerks, in drafting our letter, could draw the attention of the minister to the plan—a different minister is responsible for the plan—and ask if the new approach will influence the response regarding community engagement. On the face of it, at least for those areas suffering depopulation, which are the areas where many of the windfarms are proposed, that seems to me to be a new factor that the Scottish Government has brought in as, apparently, a new approach and a new policy.

I am sorry to go on at some length.

I hear what you say, but I am just not convinced. There was a complete failure to adhere to the very clear schedule of works and programming. It set out in which year every section would be done, and that was completely abandoned.

I think that we need to get at this because there was five years where—

Was he? I am sorry. I did not realise that.

Has there been any review? Has Transport Scotland not done a review of any sort? Has there been none whatsoever, despite the fact that this was the flagship pledge, and it has completely slipped? No review at all, is that right, Mr Shackman?

I will park it there, but I do not think—

Just standing back for a moment, the capital budget that is available to the Scottish Government each year is of the order of between £4,000 million to £5,000 million. It is reasonable to assume that that will continue to be the case. By 2035, which is 10 years, my maths suggest that there is a total of £40,000 million to £50,000 million available in the capital budget. The Highlands wants £3,700 million, which is less than 10 per cent of that total.

Why is the Scottish Government not making a clear cast-iron commitment or guarantee that, if MIM proves to be too expensive, for the reasons that the cabinet secretary has set out, a sum equivalent to less than one 10th of the total capital will be available for the Highlands, particularly since—this is just a matter of fact—there has been hardly any spending on roads projects in the Highlands since devolution? All the money has gone elsewhere. We have had a couple of roundabouts and a couple of small sections of dual carriageway.

Surely the Government recognises that it is the Highlands’ turn. If the Government cannot make a commitment that if MIM is too expensive traditional capital spend will be used, does that not suggest that the Highlands do not even merit a 10th of the total capital spend between now and 2035, a proposition that will simply not go down very well at all in my constituency or in the Highlands as a whole?

I will move on to a different point that Grahame Barn raised in some detail in his evidence. Unlike in the past, over the next 10 years, an enormous amount of civil engineering work is planned to be undertaken in Scotland, and in the Highlands in particular. We are looking at £40 billion on grid upgrades, £1 billion for Scottish Water and £3.5 billion for Network Rail to electrify the rail network. There is substantial civil engineering work involving Aventus Energy in Invergordon in renewables, and then there are the pumped storage contracts that SSE and others plan.

The reason why I raise that is that Grahame Barn pointed out that that means that there will be a big choice of work for civil engineers and, arguably, some of the other works that I have mentioned may be more profitable than roads contracts, where the profit margins typically have at best been 3 per cent, although that has never been achieved in the past several years according to CECA.

What is the Government’s view? Is there a real risk that even if we assume that the money is available, there will not be the companies, the people and the expertise to carry it out, because they will be too busy doing other more profitable work, which we all hope will be able to be done as well?