Chamber and committees

We are speculating as to what the model might be. I think it is perfectly possible for communities to be part of delivering franchise services. The question is how we guide the delivery of those services and how we plan them.

Councils can do a lot as well. Stirling Council has a green transport convener at Stirling, and four new lifeline rural routes have been established in the last year. That is with municipal ownership. What is clear is that the larger bus companies, such as Stagecoach and McGill’s, are not interested in running the more rural routes. We know that demand-responsive transport—DRT—has not really worked in Scotland.

There is the opportunity with franchising to bundle up services, with the profitable services helping to subsidise the less-profitable ones, and then to invite companies and community groups to tender for those.

Glasgow provides a clear model, because there is the powerful Strathclyde Partnership for Transport, which, as a regional transport partnership—an RTP—could commission new services and could control services and pricing. Across the rest of Scotland, we do not have the same model—there is not another SPT. There are regional transport partnerships but they are different and do not have the same powers as SPT. Councils on their own might struggle with doing this. Look at Clackmannanshire Council. There are only two bus routes that are profitable in Clackmannanshire. The opportunities to cross-subsidise the profitable and the less profitable just are not there. It is early days, but I would say to the cabinet secretary that we need either reform of RTPs to give them more powers, or for more explicit powers to be given to the new regional councils to command and control transport in the area.

If there is time in hand, I want to briefly talk about rail. Many rural communities were abandoned during the Beeching cuts, and most of those lines are not coming back. However, there are rural communities that still see passenger trains going past their homes, and they would use those trains, but they simply cannot because there is no station. Newburgh in Fife would fit a perfect slot in the railway timetable for services between Edinburgh and Perth to stop there. It has an excellent location for a low-cost rail halt. There is widespread support for the station to be reopened, from the whole of Newburgh and surrounding communities, and especially from local businesses who want to welcome visitors. There is also a growing population in the area, and all those people need a rail service.

I have been working with the Newburgh train station campaign for over a decade now. Green MSPs negotiated the local rail development fund with the Scottish Government, which gave Newburgh the support it needed to produce a robust business case for the reopening. However, Newburgh is stuck in the Transport Scotland project pipeline, which seems to have ground to a halt. I agree with the Newburgh campaign when it said in evidence to Parliament this week that the decision on their station needs to be driven by Network Rail and ScotRail. We are at a point where the investment case for Newburgh is sound, but the detailed specialist design of the station needs approval alongside agreement on the timetabling.

Once the station is built—and I really hope that it will be—it will generate income for decades to come, at next to no cost for ScotRail. That fare income will be supporting Scotland’s nationalised train service. I urge the cabinet secretary to hit the approval button for Newburgh, and not to delay.

17:58

I put to the member that investment in concessionary travel has supported rural services. The companies that run rural bus services get a reimbursement rate that is based on the percentage of the full fare ticket price and, as the member knows, ticket prices in rural areas are high. As a result of the concessionary travel schemes, the companies, community groups and others that run services in rural areas are getting a bigger investment than the companies that do so in urban areas.

In the spirit of that discipline, is it important that we look at what the cost benefit analysis is for each project? Where we have lower-cost projects that can be transformative for communities but come in at a relatively low price, Transport Scotland and the cabinet secretary need to pay heed to that. On the back of that, I ask the cabinet secretary when he can make a decision for Newburgh.

Will the cabinet secretary give way?

I thank Tim Eagle for lodging his motion. He is right that, alongside housing, transport is a top issue for people who live in rural Scotland. We know how transport affects people’s ability to access other services, which Donald MacKinnon spoke about in relation to health. Over the years, I have met countless people who have had to turn down jobs or move from their homes because of the cost or lack of availability of transport in their rural communities.

I warmly welcomed the First Minister’s announcement at the SNP conference the other week about the desire to bring in public control of our bus network. We think that that would be done through franchising. The cabinet secretary is thinking about that, and it would be fair to say that the plan is embryonic at this point, but there is lots of innovation across Scotland that we can draw on, particularly if we look at rural examples. As an example, I highlight Glenfarg Community Transport in Kinross-shire. In its area, Stagecoach withdrew the local bus service because only six people a day were using it. Two years later, 1,200 passengers a week are using the service. That is because Glenfarg Community Transport listened to what people needed and delivered the services that they wanted.

I have engaged with those campaigners in the south of Scotland in the past. There is a huge wish list emerging from the debate. I am sure that the cabinet secretary is totting up the value of all these projects—all these roads and railway lines—and I suggest that the totality is unaffordable. The member mentioned Center Parcs. Does he see a way to fund such projects, where we see land values increasing as a result of development and, potentially, of building a railway line? Is that a way to bring in revenue so that the investment is not all coming from Scottish Government capital funding?

I am glad that the member is asking why those projects are not being delivered. Will he acknowledge that, in some cases, the reality is that landowners are effectively holding back the development of key sections of our national cycling infrastructure and that unless we are able to bring forward compulsory purchase to allow us to assemble the land we need for those projects, they will be delayed and delayed?

To ask the Scottish Government what steps it will take to ensure that people waiting for an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or autism assessment are not adversely impacted by its planned integration of national health service boards. (S7O-00403)

Children who are seeking support rely on the education pathway, which is meant to lead to NHS intervention if appropriate. However, that is not happening in reality and the pathway is incredibly disjointed. How will the Scottish Government ensure that every step of the pathway is resourced and integrated between health and education to ensure that children who need assessments will get them?

Andrew Baxter, should we move to you?