Chamber and committees

Well, I do not know; I suppose that, arguably, either might be possible. In any event, welcome; I am delighted to have you with us this morning. We will move straight to questions, if that is okay. When we conclude, if we have not touched on anything that you think might be helpful, we would be pleased to hear it.

Let me start with Alex Neil’s evidence. In painting a picture of his meeting with civil servants on the original commitment to the A9, Alex Neil said that one of them kind of looked at him and said that they could be pursuing lots of other projects. Alex Neil replied, saying that the A9 project had one thing that none of those other projects had: “a manifesto commitment”. Indeed, it very much was a manifesto commitment of the Scottish National Party as it went into Government.

What was your commitment to the project, Mr Salmond, and your understanding of the credibility of what was being proposed and the Government’s ability to achieve it?

I will bring in David Torrance next.

First, I listened with interest this morning when you were on “Good Morning Scotland”, being asked questions similar to some of those that we are exploring—

Earlier, I alluded to a couple of supplementary questions, one of which is on oversight. We have talked about the Queensferry crossing. It was motivated by a bill that allowed a committee of Parliament to be intimately involved in the planning of the access route that would be required, including looking at the different types of bridges that might be available and handing to the Government, through the bill process, a project that it was then able to execute on time and on budget and within the lifetime of everybody involved, from those who were involved in the initial decision to do it through to those who cut the red tape, if you like, on the project.

We can reflect on the A9 project. The commitment was first made in 2007 and remains unfulfilled now, in 2024—we are talking about it being completed potentially in 2035. That is a lifetime, several times over, of interested parties and those who were committed to the project coming and going and, potentially, losing sight of the narrative. Your creative suggestion was, in essence, “Bring back Alex Neil and all will be back on track.”

The Government has expressed some interest in the engagement that we have had to date. Therefore, I wonder whether, with your parliamentary experience, it would be possible to find some mechanism whereby there might be consistency of attention on the project from the Parliament, which might help to maintain momentum and focus. Can you think of a mechanism that might assist in ensuring that we do not find that even the work that we are doing here is forgotten about in the course of the next parliamentary session and that, in the parliamentary session after that, people are sitting wondering why we have not delivered the project even by then?

We shall embrace that as our motto. Thank you very much. We are very grateful to you for finding the time to be here and for giving such expansive responses to our questions.

Good morning, and welcome to the eighth meeting in 2024 of the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee. Our first item of business is a decision on considering in private later the evidence that we hear this morning. Do we agree to take that business in private?

Members indicated agreement.

On that point, I have noticed that parties that make the long march from Opposition into Government are committed to the manifesto that they fought the election on and which got them there, as I think you said was the case in 2007. However, in the time that I have been involved in politics, it has seemed to me that, the more that a Government is re-elected, the less importance it attaches to manifestos and the more it starts to evolve priorities that perhaps did not feature in manifestos to quite the same extent, with the result that a kind of drift can occur.

There is a difficulty in that I do not think that we have really understood what happened around 2018, which is after your time, when it looks as if the commitment to completing the dualling by 2025 was lost. That deprioritisation may have been led by ministers who were on top of the project and realised something was not right and started to think about whether there were other ways that the project could be funded, or it might have come about because officials started to think that the project might not be affordable and that they might need to find other ways of funding it, but there seems to have been a lack of grip and leadership at that point—that is what the evidence suggests.

I wonder whether the focus on and drive behind delivering on commitments that parties are very concerned with when they come into office—possibly because those are on the great projects that they have thought about—are lost the longer that they stay in office. How would you reflect on that?

Sorry, Mr Ewing, for the digression, but it was an interesting one, since you were involved.

Not at all—in fact, you posed one of the questions that the committee itself is trying to explore. At some point, something happened, and whatever that something was, we have not yet been able to properly get to the bottom of what it was, nor was it made public at a point when it must have been apparent to the people who were aware of what was happening.

We might come back to that, but I will bring in David Torrance now.

Our principal item of business is the continuation of our inquiry into the A9 dualling project, on the back of the petition that was lodged by Laura Hansler, who I see joins us in the public gallery for this morning’s evidence. This meeting follows on from evidence that we have heard along the way from representatives of the Civil Engineering Contractors Association; current and former senior leaders at Transport Scotland; and Màiri McAllan MSP, who was transport secretary when she gave evidence, before Fiona Hyslop resumed her responsibility in that direction.

We are joined this morning by Edward Mountain, who is here as a reporter for the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee in relation to the inquiry. Thank you, Edward, for joining us again. Edward is moving amendments to a bill at stage 2 elsewhere this morning, so if he gets a jab from a knitting needle to tell him that his amendment is about to be called, he will have to leave our proceedings.

Those of you who have been following the progress of the inquiry will know that we are primarily focused on what action needs to be taken to get the project back on track. That is what the petitioner and all those who are interested in the A9 project are looking for us to achieve. Along the way, we have heard evidence about the major capital infrastructure projects that are likely to unfold over the next five years and decade. The access to, and ability to capitalise on, those projects would be compromised by not having the infrastructure eventually in place.

In this inquiry, we also want to look back to understand why we are where we are, what led to the delays and at what point those delays became apparent.

This week in Parliament has felt like a very retro week, if I can put it that way, with John Swinney re-emerging as the leader of the Scottish National Party and our First Minister; with a retro look back into the affairs of the A9; and with evidence this morning from Alex Salmond, who is the former First Minister of Scotland and whom I am very pleased to welcome. I recall that one former leader revisiting events said that the Mummy had returned; I do not know what epitaph Mr Salmond would wish to offer for his own evidence this morning.

I am not sure that it would.