Meeting of the Parliament 15 March 2016
There are many concepts for which there is no word or phrase in the English language. We usually overcome that by borrowing from the French, but there is one concept that we cannot borrow from the French for; we have to borrow from the Germans. That concept is schadenfreude. I will define that in my own way. It is what happens when an Opposition spokesman takes great pleasure in watching the minister whom he shadows squirm under pressure, and that is exactly what happened during the first days of the Forth road bridge closure.
When the committee decided that it would progress an inquiry, my ambition was to find the smoking gun and blame the minister for the failings. It is a fact that the inquiry produced no evidence that that smoking gun existed. The inquiry was much more interesting than that and the process was much more educational. A number of things really need to be gone through.
The closure was massively disruptive. It happened at a time of the year when a closure would be most disruptive to people who live in the Fife area and often work in Edinburgh. The long alternative routes were an economic imposition. I have been told that shops in Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy probably had their best run-up to Christmas in many a long year, but most of the impact of the closure was economically negative.
The first thing that we have to look at is what happened and whether it could have been foreseen. It was identified that the truss end links had to be worked on, but engineers who gave evidence made it clear that their concerns related to the opposite end of the same steel beam. I questioned a number of engineers at great length and suggested that, if they had gone ahead with that work, they might have discovered the problem at the other end of the link, but I could not get an engineer to agree with that concept. I believed that, had the work been done on the top end of those links, the engineers might have discovered the problem, but there was no evidence to suggest that that could have happened. In fact, it became fairly obvious that the problem that existed at the bottom end of the links with the pins that seized had not been foreseen or experienced in any similar circumstance.
The news that the bridge had been closed for that reason had a big impact on the local economy, but it also sent engineers around the world scurrying across suspension bridges to see whether that problem existed at the equivalent point in their constructions. The evidence was that that problem had not been experienced on any similar bridge anywhere else, although we heard that a similar component on the Humber bridge had experienced excessive wear. However, the problem there was exactly the opposite of the one that caused the problem on the Forth road bridge.
During the inquiry, we heard about the inspection regime—the components were inspected regularly—and about the decision-making process to close the bridge. Perhaps there was a concern that the decision to go ahead with the full closure apparently required a Cabinet meeting. The minister addressed that in his opening remarks, but we should take cognisance of that.
One of the big concerns is about the way in which capital funding was decided on in the time that led through the issue. When tolls were charged for using the bridge, the bridge had its own income. As the minister pointed out, the spend on the bridge has exceeded the expected toll revenue in the time since the tolls were abolished. However, he did not recognise that the bridge managers had the capacity to borrow against the toll income in the longer term, so the abolition of the tolls had an effect on funding.
What concerns me most—I still have questions that were never answered adequately—is the relationship between FETA and the Scottish Government at the time when the decisions about prioritising work on the bridge were being taken. Both sides believe that they were doing the right thing, but I am not convinced that both sides were thinking in the same way. The evidence from FETA was that it believed that it was operating in a set of circumstances where funding was limited, while the Scottish Government believed that it was in a position to fund any work that was necessary. Those two views do not match up 100 per cent; there was some confusion in that relationship.