Meeting of the Parliament 16 January 2025
One of the frustrations of opening a debate on behalf of the committee is that I cannot freewheel in my usual style; I have to adhere to a text, which is very frustrating.
The subject of the debate will be familiar to many colleagues across the chamber. However, I was not directly involved in it prior to convening the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee’s inquiry into the A9 dualling programme, other than as a semi-regular user of the road.
As convener of the committee, I put on record again my thanks to Laura Hansler. Every petition has its origin in a member of the public who comes to us with an issue that they wish us to pursue. We do so without fear or favour, with no manifesto underpinning our work but to challenge and represent the petitioner’s concern.
Laura Hansler joins us in the public gallery, and I thank her for lodging the petition calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to fulfil its 2011 promise to dual the A9 between Perth and Inverness, which provided the catalyst for our inquiry. I commend her for her commitment to the issue over a long number of years, including through the forthright and powerful evidence that she provided directly to the committee, as well as by faithfully attending meetings to observe the evidence that we heard from past and present Scottish Government ministers and officials, about which I will say more shortly.
The petition was lodged in December 2022 and it includes a call for completion of the dualling work by 2025. As members will be aware, before we had the opportunity to even consider the petition, the then Minister for Transport, Jenny Gilruth, announced that the 2025 completion date was “simply no longer achievable”. That announcement in February 2023 and the initial evidence that we gathered from the petitioner, the Civil Engineering Contractors Association and Transport Scotland led to the committee taking the unusual step of elevating its consideration of the petition to the level of an inquiry.
Throughout the inquiry, the committee sought to explore the circumstances that led to the 2025 completion date becoming unachievable, as well as to consider on-going challenges that might impact on the successful dualling of the A9 by the Scottish Government’s new target completion date of 2035. In doing so, we gathered evidence from people with technical and industry expertise, from people and businesses that were affected by issues along that arterial route, and from those who held the highest positions in the Government.
The committee is grateful to all who have contributed to our consideration of the matter, whether in person or in writing, including the former First Ministers Humza Yousaf, Nicola Sturgeon and the late Alex Salmond, whose final appearance before the Parliament was at our committee. I thank the many political parties that sought to give evidence to the committee during its inquiry, which I must say excludes the Scottish Greens. I also thank the clerks and all parliamentary staff who supported the committee throughout the process, as well as Transport Scotland officials for the volume of evidence that was made available to the committee when we requested various documents relating to the A9 dualling programme.