Chamber and committees

The witnesses will have read the statement by Mr Barn and will have heard the evidence that he gave to the committee this morning. What he is saying is very clear. He praises the professionalism of Mr Shackman and his colleagues, and I endorse that, but the praise ends there. In his statement, he goes on to say that, from a civil engineering contractor’s point of view, Transport Scotland is the worst client in Britain.

That is not a personal comment; that is based on his assessment, which you have heard, that, as far as road building in Scotland is concerned, your form of contract, which passes all risk to the contractor, who has minimal margins of profit at 2 per cent, has resulted in the completely unacceptable outcome of there being only one bidder in two contracts—the Haudagain roundabout and the Tomatin to Moy section—despite the fact that the whole purpose of a tender process is to attract competitive bids. That has failed.

I am not trying to catch you out, but do you accept that the current procedure is just not fit for purpose and that, therefore, we now need to move on from that, without overly recriminating about the past, because we cannot do anything about that? Perhaps the committee can help in working out together how to solve the problem of getting a form of contract—a form of procurement—that, provided that the Scottish Government is willing to put up the money, which is not your responsibility but its responsibility, can deliver the swift completion of the project of dualling the A9, for all the reasons that the petitioner so eloquently and passionately set out in her opening statement.

Well, they do not really have much choice, do they?

Seriously, I want to ask one further question. As the petitioner rightly said, nine sections out of 11 have not been done. Only one of those has not had a design sorted out—essentially, the Dunkeld section. Three sections have had ministerial approval, but four have gone to what is called made orders, which means that they have gone through the legal process. The legal process for two of those four sections was completed well over a year ago—coming up for two years ago, I think.

Am I right in saying that absolutely nothing—apart from an unwillingness to devote sufficient funding—prevented the Scottish Government from progressing those four sections immediately after completion of the made orders, had there been a necessary will to implement the promised dualling of the A9? The made order means that you have sorted out compulsory purchase and ancillary roads orders; that you have gone through the process of consultation; that you have your design route; and that everything has been sorted out and is ready to roll—“shovel-ready” is the phrase. Given your knowledge of the practicalities about how those sorts of things work, is that an oversimplification or is it a fair comment and correct explanation?

I have just been refused some information—or, at least, information has been refused under FOI legislation—on the grounds of internal candour. That is the information about which I am talking. It is specifically about the interchange between you and the Scottish Government on value for money and the sufficiency of Scottish Government funding. As long as that information is not published, there will be unanswered questions, frustration, anger and irritation. That just will not go away so the sooner that the Scottish Government does what it did in the Holyrood inquiry in 2003, and the more recent Salmond inquiry, and publishes the available advice notes, the better for our work and, more important, the public interest.

I understand that those are all complex matters, and I know that you have been in regular dialogue with CECA, which you meet several times a year. What I do not understand—I do not say this to be recriminatory—is that you have admitted mea culpa, that the system is broken and that it is not fit for purpose, which is patently the case and has been obvious for quite a long time. Surely, therefore, particularly over the past couple of years of this parliamentary session, the advice about precisely how the contract should be changed—to perhaps some form of contract as set out by Mr Barn—so that risk sharing is used, should have been given back in 2021, at the latest. Why have we not made more progress more quickly? Mr Barn referred to glacial progress. Is he right about that as well?

Okay. I want to put to you a point that Mr Barn made. Four of the sections have made orders. In two sections, the made orders were made well over a year ago; the other two were made more recently but still some time ago. Mr Barn said that, as soon as things reach that point, the contracts are ready to go. People are ready to press the button and ready to go into procurement, provided that the Scottish Government provides the money. Did you ask the Scottish Government to provide the money for each of those sections as soon as they reached made orders? If so, what was the response?

That’s what they all say. [Laughter.]

I am grateful to Jackie Baillie for shedding light on the new information that there are linkages between Covid-19 and thrombosis, as well as other linkages, which would suggest that there is a need for further consideration of what preventative interventions may be appropriate in identifying cases where there is a risk predisposition. It would be well worth putting to that to the minister.

I am new to this and I do not know the petitioner, but having read through the papers, I picked up that the loss of his daughter was a crushing blow. He has been through the mill. One death is one too many and I bear that in mind when I refer to numbers. However, there is a clear conflict between the figures that he has provided, which indicate that there are 11,400 deaths per annum in Scotland, whereas the figures in the Scottish Government’s submission indicate that there were 380 deaths from blood clots in 2021 and a total of 1,925 where blood clots were mentioned on the death certificate—380 as an underlying cause and 1,545 as a contributory cause. In turn, the petitioner replied saying that:

“It is not the first time the Scottish Government has quoted one set of figures when there are other figures which reflect the case I put forward”.

I would be interested to learn more about that and to tease out why the figures that he refers to are roughly 10 times greater than the figures that the Scottish Government uses.

Whether or not there have been 1,000 or 10,000 deaths, it is such a serious thing; the consequences can be fatal in serious cases. Whether there is a public information campaign or other specific actions that are taken on the basis of proper clinical considerations about preventative action, we need more information on the matter from the Scottish Government. I do not have a view on whether we want to do that by letter or in an evidence session.

It is perhaps for the committee to consider the matter later, but my first reaction would be to recommend that you as Lord Advocate make a specific series of recommendations about how the injustice suffered by the parents can be remedied. I will admit that it is not a straightforward matter, but then I have discovered that very few things in Government are. Nonetheless, this is an important issue, and just because something is difficult does not mean that Governments can fail to discharge their functions.

From memory, the figure that was provided in the tender for Tomatin to Moy as the estimated value of the contract was £115 million. Can you explain from your industry knowledge whether that represented a detailed estimate after ground investigations had been done? In other words, how robust is that figure as an accurate indication or estimate of the likely cost of the project?

The point that I am making is that it is perhaps wrong to postulate that £115 million was a proper estimate at all; it was more or less a stab in the dark. We do not actually know whether that figure was a valid basis for a yardstick of value. Is that a fair comment?