Meeting of the Parliament 15 March 2016
Thank you, Presiding Officer.
I am glad to have the chance to contribute to the debate. I thank the Infrastructure and Capital Investment Committee for its inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the closure of the Forth bridge and for its report.
As we heard, on 1 December, while conducting routine maintenance, Amey staff identified the failure of one of the truss end links on the north-west corner of the main span of the Forth bridge. The decision was subsequently taken to close the bridge to all traffic at midnight. The closure of the bridge caused massive inconvenience for many people and had a huge negative impact on many businesses that rely on the bridge for vital transport links.
I want to focus primarily on two aspects of the committee’s report: the inspection regime under FETA and Amey, and funding.
The committee was rightly keen to examine the inspection regimes under both FETA and Amey, which took over the day-to-day management and maintenance of the bridge after FETA was formally wound up on 1 June. The committee’s report has a great deal of encouraging things to say about the inspection regime on the bridge under both FETA and Amey. It makes it clear that there was a robust and innovative approach to inspection, through a risk-based inspection regime. I was glad to hear that the same inspection regime was continued under Transport Scotland when it took over day-to-day responsibility for the Forth bridge, with the chief bridge engineer at Transport Scotland setting the standard for inspection that is carried out by Amey.
I was also heartened to hear that under both Amey and FETA, bridgemasters communicated with many different industry forums in the UK and internationally to share best practice.
The committee’s report also makes clear the extreme difficulty of checking the truss end links and, in particular, in examining whether the pins are operating correctly. All expert witnesses who appeared before the committee agreed that everything reasonable had been done to inspect the truss end links and pins, and that the failure that caused the bridge’s closure was “unforeseen and unforeseeable”.
That brings me to the second issue that I want to consider: funding. The abolition of the tolls that had been levied on users since the bridge opened in 1964 was a huge change in the funding arrangements for maintenance and operation of the bridge. At the time, FETA expressed profound concern about the change in funding. In particular, concern was expressed about funding from Transport Scotland being irregular and subject to unpredictable and significant fluctuation. Indeed, Councillor Lesley Hinds, a former convener of FETA, suggested to the committee that the change in funding arrangements had resulted in the loss of up to £12 million per annum, which meant that FETA had either to apply for capital funding from Transport Scotland or to use its reserves, which surely brought an element of uncertainty into the capital planning process. Why, oh why, were the tolls abolished? We can all remember the expensive automatic toll gates that went up one day and came down the next.