Meeting of the Parliament 02 November 2022
We have been here before. Nearly a year ago we held an almost identical debate, calling on the Scottish Government to reaffirm its commitment to dualling the A9 and the A96, and to commit to upgrading other roads. We lost. The Scottish National Party amended our motion to take out any reference to particular roads.
Today, the SNP amendment mentions both roads, but nowhere in it is a commitment to fully dual them. Instead, we have the language of short-term fixes and a review. It looks very much as though those historic commitments lie in the gutter.
The SNP was once behind these projects. It committed to fully dualling the A9 between Perth and Inverness by 2025. Since that pledge was made 11 years ago, just over 12 miles have been completed—a little over a mile a year. At that rate, it will be 2086 by the time the other 70 miles are complete. I am afraid to say that none of us will be around to see it. Nicola Sturgeon can cancel the photo call—there will be no selfies on the A9 for her, and nor should there be, because there is a very sorry tale to tell.
Since our debate last year, a number of lives have been lost. So far this year, there have been 12 deaths on the A9 between Perth and Inverness—the highest number for 12 years, and all on single-carriageway sections. The latest incident—last month—saw 64-year-old George Norris killed when his Ford C-Max was in a collision with two other vehicles near Kingussie. Also in October, a man and a woman died when their car collided with a lorry near Birnam, south of Dunkeld. There were two fatal crashes on the A9 in September, one near Slochd and another near?Dunkeld, along with a fatality near Carrbridge on 30 September. That followed three members of one American family dying after a collision with a lorry on the A9 near Newtonmore on 10 August. Further, in July, 68-year-old David McPherson died in a crash at Slochd summit near Carrbridge, with his 65-year-old wife, Elza, and their two-year-old grandson dying in hospital a short time later.
Some 333 people have been killed on the A9 between Perth and Inverness since 1979. That is why we need desperately to fully dual that road. Accidents will continue to happen—there are different reasons for all accidents—but there will be far fewer of them. We can literally save lives by investing in these roads.
What about the A96? Thankfully, the death toll on the A96 this year has not been as bad as it has been on the A9. There was one fatality, though, in January, when 78-year-old John Channon of Dyce died following a crash near Auldearn.
The campaign to dual the A96 has been going on for 30 years. As far back as 1989, The Press and Journal was running a campaign called “end the carnage, spend the cash”. At that point, it was the UK Government that was responsible. It did not end the carnage and it did not spend the cash, and nothing has really changed since devolution.
In 2011, the SNP committed to completing the dualling of the road between Inverness and Aberdeen by 2030. Of course, that was before it did its deal with the Greens, which put a halt to things while we wait for a “transparent, evidence-based review” of the environmental impacts of the project. Last year, Transport Scotland was claiming that the study would be completed by the end of this year, and the minister’s amendment today makes the same claim.
I can only hope that Transport Scotland has not been listening too much to the words of Green MSP Maggie Chapman, who predicted last year that the review would find that it
“isn’t viable to dual the whole way”.
The problem that we have here is that the SNP has been ensnared by the Greens. It is almost as though Jenny Gilruth has to ask permission from Maggie Chapman to do anything. We can imagine the conversation: “Please, Maggie, can I dual the roads?”; “No, minister—don’t you remember? It’s not viable.” We really are in a bad place if we are to base our roads improvement programme on the views of Maggie Chapman.
Of course, investing in those roads is not just about road safety. Making transport easier boosts the local and—because of the roads’ strategic importance—national economy. Members would not expect the anti-growth Greens to understand that, but I would have thought that wiser heads in the SNP might do so.
It would be remiss of me not to mention other roads in Scotland that are in dire need of improvement, such as the A75 and A77. Between 2018 and last year, on those two roads, there were nine fatal accidents—a shocking toll of death. Today, I met members of the A77 action group—