Chamber and committees

In all fairness, the United Kingdom Government has not yet responded to the report, so we do not know what its view will be. I credit the Scottish Government for making an immediate payment of £1,000 to affected women and for paying for women to go to the United States to have mesh removed.

On the back of the Cumberlege report, the Scottish Government was committed, in principle, to a further redress scheme. Is the minister at least prepared to say that, in relation to a compensation scheme that might finally emerge, it would be unconscionable for women in Scotland to be in any way disadvantaged compared with women anywhere else? We were at the forefront internationally of responding to mesh, and it would be to our great detriment if we were to find ourselves falling behind.

Good morning and welcome to the second meeting in 2024 of the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee.

The first item on the agenda is one for colleagues, and it is a decision on taking business in private. Do members agree to take in private item 5, which is consideration of the evidence that we are about to hear from the cabinet secretary and others as well as the evidence that we will hear in relation to whistleblowers, and item 6, which is consideration of our work programme?

Members indicated agreement.

I want to start with a question that I put to Mr Galbraith last week, and he will, no doubt, want to reassure me in the same soporific tones with which he sought to reassure me last time.

First of all, this is not an issue that I have been directly involved with; indeed, as the member for Eastwood, I have to say that it is not the first thing that is of concern to my constituents, and it is not, as it is for some, my particular field of expertise. However, I read through the narrative, and here I come to the point that I tried to explain to Mr Galbraith. What I saw in that narrative was that, even though there was an acceptance of the challenges associated with all of this, there was still a consistency of commitment and policy objective with regard to delivering the A9 by 2025, both privately and publicly, from the moment the project was announced until somewhere around 2018 when—as I found on reading the papers—a vagueness started to come in.

I have never been able to quite understand the genesis of that. It is not clear to me whether it was those involved in the delivery of the project who thought that something was not going to happen and that they needed to start thinking about different funding streams and operational approaches—none of this was shared with the public, by the way; it was all happening internally—or whether ministers themselves were leading all of this.

Last week, Grahame Barn said that he thought that the target became unachievable

“because the political will to provide the funding required to do the job just was not there when required.”—[Official Report, Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee, 24 January 2024; c 4.]

I want to try to understand this. Given that the Parliament and the public only became aware much later that we were not achieving the target, I would like to know what happened. How did it become apparent to ministers that the challenges that had been identified might mean that there would be a delay, and who then tried to drive things forward by looking at whether there were different ways of doing it? Did it come from the top down or the bottom up?

To be fair to Mr Galbraith, he was halfway through his response, Mr Ewing, so I will allow him to finish.

A couple of questions arise from what I have heard. On the £3.7 billion, there is a funding trail in the pile of documents that we have received. At one point, figures as high as £6.25 billion were identified in relation to the project. Can you explain why you are confident about the figure of £3.7 billion? Is that a comprehensive figure, or did the allusion to £6.25 billion in papers that we received include other considerations? Have those disappeared, or do they continue to sit alongside the £3.7 billion?

I am not sure that they are at an all-time high; they are at a relative high.

Thank you, cabinet secretary. Before I conclude, is there anything further that you or your colleagues feel that we have not touched on that you had come along expecting to reveal to us today?

Finally, cabinet secretary, I note that, in the 2007 to 2011 session of Parliament, I was the convener of a hybrid bill committee that was set up to take forward the Queensferry crossing project. It identified the route and the difficulties that there were going to be in various villages during the process. As was pointed out, that was because of the need for an act of Parliament, which drove the requirement for parliamentary scrutiny, but it seemed that the cross-party nature of a parliamentary committee looking at and agreeing the project that Government ministers were then invited to deliver overcame some particularly difficult issues to progress.

We are where we are in the different processes that are in place. I think that we all recognise from the paperwork that we have read and everything else that, in the Pass of Birnam to Tay crossing section, the issue around Dunkeld is particularly difficult to grapple with. You have talked about there having been only one public inquiry so far. Are you building into the thinking in relation to the project that there could yet be difficult areas that have to be resolved, which could lead to a challenge with timing?

In which case, thank you for your engagement and the engagement of your colleagues.

Does the committee agree on the proposed course of action?

Members indicated agreement.