Meeting of the Parliament 28 November 2024
The member asks whether I am satisfied. Of course I am not satisfied, but I am also not satisfied with the impact of successive capital restrictions on our budget. I am also dissatisfied with some of the decisions that the Government had to make when it came to power in 2007—for example, when the member’s party and others insisted that we invested in the Edinburgh trams project rather than the A9. I am also concerned about the consequences of Brexit—a Brexit that is still supported by the Labour Party.
Those issues have all had consequences for the capital provision of this Government. Despite that fact, we have made major capital infrastructure investments, many of them in the north-east of Scotland. For example, the SNP Government delivered the Aberdeen western peripheral route. It was thought of and planned, and it might have been done before, but it never was. It took the SNP Government coming to power to deliver on that.
Despite all those pressures, we have managed to make infrastructure investments. Some of that has not happened at the pace that I would have wanted, but I think that any reasonable person, looking at the pressures and the experience of the past 10 years, would understand that a timeline that was reasonable in 2011 is not reasonable or deliverable now, and certainly not when we look at the budget position in which the Scottish Government currently finds itself.