Hansard

I completely agree with that point, and I commend Douglas Ross for putting in a huge amount of work to secure that money from the UK Government at the time. It is a real shame that the Labour Government did not continue to agree to that funding, because Moray Council had planned for the project. As Douglas Ross laid out, the community had raised a significant volume of money to enable it to happen. I know that there are no Labour front-bench members in the chamber tonight, but I think that the Labour Government needs to reflect on that.

Both of those bridges are local and historic, but they share a much deeper commonality: they show how vital these physical links are to the people who use them every day and how fragile our rural connectivity has become under the strain of age, underinvestment and funding pressures.

It is not just a Moray problem. Across rural Scotland, bridges large and small are ageing and falling into disrepair. They are on councils’ amber and red lists of concern, yet the works are required to restore them are often not being done at the pace or scale that is needed. Councils are doing their best with constrained budgets, but local government funding simply does not stretch to cover the scale of maintenance and renewal that is needed for that critical infrastructure.

We have seen similar situations elsewhere. In Aberdeenshire, constituents in Aboyne have been campaigning for repairs to their bridge, which has been closed. Only now is strengthening work being agreed; I am sure that my colleague, Alexander Burnett, will highlight that later.

In Keith, another area in Moray, a landslip at Union bridge took more than a year to repair, and that was on the main A96—a critical road for the north of Scotland. That is an unacceptable timetable.

Further south, in Dumfries and Galloway, in Finlay Carson’s constituency, Kirkcudbright bridge has faced closure and structural restrictions as a result of deterioration, requiring traffic management measures and long-term replacement plans.

I am pretty confident that I could name a bridge in every constituency in Scotland that has an uncertain future. Even on the same rivers we have problems, with Highland Council putting in several bridges into “managed decline”, including the Spey bridge at Cromdale, which is a critical link between the village and Grantown-on-Spey.

Whatever the Scottish Government wants to tell me tonight about funding and support is not the reality on the ground. If it was, Cloddach, Aboyne, Spey and Kirkcudbright bridges would been fixed much sooner, and perhaps there would already be a clear future for the Spey viaduct. I would rather not hear about what the Scottish National Party thinks that it has done; instead, I want to hear about how it will ensure that there is proactive, strategic support targeted at rural connections beyond headline infrastructure projects.

That means that we need more support for rural bridge maintenance and renewal, and practical support to enable councils to plan long-term programmes rather than firefighting crisis. It means ensuring that historic listed bridges get the specialist attention that they deserve, and consistent monitoring with specialist inspections, before problems become catastrophic collapses.