Meeting of the Parliament 20 December 2023
I thank the cabinet secretary for advance sight of her statement, although we have been waiting for the update since February and here we are, on the second-last sitting day of the year. However, our wait here is as nothing to the wait of the people of Perth and Kinross and the Highlands and Islands, who have been waiting for years to see this vital project completed, with an SNP Government in power that has delivered a mere 11 miles of dual carriageway in 16 years.
Throughout that period, too many lives have needlessly been lost, and more will die as a result of the delays that we have heard about today. At best, we will wait another 12 years for the project to be completed, and that is the most optimistic outcome that we can hope for.
The cabinet secretary did her best to deflect criticism on to the UK Government, but I would gently remind her that, if the SNP had kept its promise to complete the dualling by 2025, the challenges that she identified with inflation and her Government’s capital budget would not have been an issue.
Today, we were expecting to hear that a contract had been placed for the Tomatin to Moy section. Even that has not been delivered. Instead, the best that we have is an expectation that there will be a contract award in summer next year. One year on from where we were at the start of this year, we are precisely no further forward.
I will therefore ask the cabinet secretary three things. First, what guarantees can she give us that the contract award for the Tomatin to Moy section will, in fact, now be done, and on the timescale that she has outlined, given all the slippage in timescales that we have seen in the past? Secondly, in relation to the remaining sections, what confidence can we have that the timescales set out today are, in fact, deliverable, even supposing that the funding can be found? Thirdly, how confident is the cabinet secretary that there is appropriate civil engineering contracting capacity to carry out those works, and what discussions has she held with industry to determine its willingness to tender for the contracts that are being proposed?