Meeting of the Parliament 18 March 2026 [Draft]
The member makes a very interesting point, and I thank him, too, for his kind comments. It is an interesting approach, and we have looked carefully at all the approaches that we could take through procurement and grants, for example to support domestic manufacturing at Alexander Dennis. The company was clear that it could not rely only on Scottish buses to get it through these difficult times—the approach had to be UK wide, so we welcome commitments to procure buses.
There has been a challenge arising from international bus manufacturing’s increased market share in those procurement processes, to which I think Stephen Kerr was alluding. We have not seen sufficient progress on some of that, as it is still putting at risk Scottish domestic manufacturing. However, we will look at all that and see whether we can learn lessons for our approach.