Meeting of the Parliament 21 January 2026
I had planned just to listen to the debate and had no intention of speaking in it, but I have been prompted to come to my feet to talk about a couple of issues.
I remind members of my entry in the register of members’ interests in that, jointly with my brother, I own a fishery on the river Spey. I have had some knowledge of rivers for 40 years, in which time I have learned that they change regularly and that they are alive and dynamic. In the past few years, I have learned that climate change makes them even more so. In the past, we perhaps expected rivers to stay within certain boundaries, but now we know that they move and shift and do not stay within them.
Increased flows and more movement of sediment and gravel make the maintenance of bridges far more important—and that is even before they fall down, not just when they do. Those of us who walk along riverbanks and look under bridges will have seen that the latter build up levels of gravel underneath them. The Spey viaduct was one of those bridges that moved from the original course of the river to one of the abutments and beyond.
If we are going to do maintenance work on bridges, it should be not only on their structures but on the riverbanks. The only way to do that is for people to get into the river and dig—that is it. However, something called the controlled activity regulations prohibits them from doing so. Those complex regulations require the incurring of costs and the taking of a massive amount of consideration, especially in special areas of conservation and sites of special scientific interest, as is the case with the Spey viaduct. The regulations frighten people away from doing the work that they need to do around bridges.
While the cabinet secretary ponders the issue of money for the maintenance of bridges, I ask her also to ponder sending out a signal to the people who manage them, to say that if they want to take preventative action before the bridges fall down—by going into the river and digging it out to make it flow where it should, where it is channelled by those bridges—the Government and SEPA will do everything in their power to make that happen.
17:54