Meeting of the Parliament 27 November 2025
I thank the member for Eastwood for lodging the motion for debate.
The member for Cumbernauld and Kilsyth summarised the issue succinctly when he talked about the wider regional issue that is facing Glasgow. The Clyde tunnel is an important piece of infrastructure for the entire Glasgow city region area, but funding and maintaining it is the responsibility of Glasgow City Council alone. That is symptomatic of a bigger challenge for the Glasgow city region. It is the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, but, with no devolution deal or elected mayor, its governance is fragmented across at least eight local authorities, and it has limited access to the types of economic growth policy levers and funding that the big city regions in England now enjoy.
The current Glasgow city deal covers eight local authorities in the city region, but there is no statutory agreement with the accompanying powers. With regard to the Clyde tunnel, that means that while Glasgow City Council shoulders the financial burden of maintaining that piece of critical infrastructure, which benefits the whole city region, neighbouring local authorities do not have a say in how the tunnel is funded or in decisions on its future.
The member for Eastwood said that I should rue my position on the issue, but I think that he ought to rue his party’s position 30 years ago, when it vindictively dismantled the Strathclyde region. At the time, John Major described Strathclyde as an “abomination”, but we are now seeing the unintended consequences of that foolish, self-interested decision.
The Scottish Government’s current position is that the Clyde tunnel is a local Glasgow City Council issue, but this debate has made it clear that it is not. I am sure that members across the chamber will agree that the injustice of the status quo is simply unsustainable. Glasgow City Council has had the largest cut to its budget of any local authority in Scotland, and it does not receive a proportionate share of the business rates revenue that is generated within the city boundary. The Glasgow roads budget has also been disproportionately cut as a consequence.
The Clyde tunnel maintenance budget now consumes 10 per cent of the entire roads maintenance budget for the city. That is 762 metres of road out of 1.8 million metres of road in the city, so 10 per cent of the budget is going on 0.04 per cent of the road network. That is certainly unsustainable. The impact is accentuated from a social justice point of view because Glasgow has the lowest car ownership in Scotland, with only 376 cars per 1,000 residents, in comparison with 678 cars per 1,000 people in Renfrewshire.
Districts with the lowest rates of car ownership in the country, such as Drumchapel and Govan, have to pay for the tunnel’s maintenance via higher council tax rates, while the richest communities in Scotland with the highest levels of car ownership, such as Bearsden and Kilmacolm, enjoy the tunnel free of charge and generally have lower council tax rates as a result.
I see four solutions to the problem, which is unsustainable and socially unjust. One solution is adoption of the Clyde tunnel as a national trunk road by Transport Scotland, in the same way as the Kingston bridge and the Erskine bridge have been adopted. However, that solution has been repeatedly resisted by the Scottish Government, despite calls over the years from me and other MSPs for it to be pursued.
A second solution is adoption of the Clyde tunnel as a regional transport asset by the city region councils, co-funded via Strathclyde Partnership for Transport or a new combined authority, restoring the approach that existed via the Strathclyde roads system from 1975 to 1996. However, that is not under consideration by the Scottish Government.
A third option is an agreement by the Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities to provide additional funding for Glasgow to cover the £820,000-a-year shortfall in the baseline local roads allocation in order to maintain the tunnel. However, the Scottish Government’s position is that it must be funded through the general budget allocation that is provided to Glasgow City Council; I think that that is completely absurd.
Finally, we could resort to the unilateral introduction by Glasgow City Council of a number-plate recognition camera toll system. I think that that is the least desirable of all the options, but it is certainly the only one that is available to the council. Nevertheless, it would require a statutory instrument and regulatory framework to be put before the Parliament by ministers, and no discussion has taken place between Glasgow City Council and the Scottish Government so far.
There is an opportunity to address the issue. In my view, the best option is to move to a combined authority approach for the Glasgow city region, which is long overdue and would certainly unleash a lot of potential across Glasgow and the greater Glasgow area. I would like the Government to look seriously at that, because—as has been mentioned—the issue is not just the boundaries or the tunnel, but a whole lot of other things—