Chamber and committees

I was interested in the emphasis that you have given to the ONS decision. I do not recall there being any ministerial statement about that at the time. Why not?

Was SFT given a deadline when it was commissioned, and did it adhere to that deadline? When did it put forward the recommendations?

I will come on to that in a moment, convener.

The first area that I want to ask about is the outline plan for completion of the A9 dualling project by the envisaged date of 2035. That is subject to one important caveat, which raises serious questions in my mind about whether the plan will be delivered. That is that the use of mutual investment model contracts is

“subject to ... further decision making in late 2025”,

based on

“an updated assessment of market conditions.”

That means that a decision could be taken not to use MIM.

What criteria will be applied in 2025 as to whether MIM will be used? If MIM is not used, what is the contingency plan?

I have one final question. Inverness is 168 miles from Glasgow, where Transport Scotland’s big office is located. There is no Transport Scotland office in Inverness or the Highlands. Almost all the capital money will be spent on the A9 or the A96 over the next 10 years. Why is there not a Transport Scotland office based in Inverness, and will there be one? Will staff be relocated there? Is the absence of such a presence not a bit of a sign that there is still not an absolute commitment to delivery of the project? Staff have to travel up the road and stay in a hotel or drive up the road and back. I have met some of the staff—

I am very concerned about the general issue of public bodies marking their own homework. When any complaint is dealt with, whether it is a complaint about staff or management, there is a tendency to circle the wagons, and nothing very much ever happens. That concern is real, and the answers from our witnesses have been very helpful.

I postulate that one solution to resolve the question of what happens if the whistleblower’s recommendation is ignored could be, if it is a criminal matter, to refer the case to, for example, a children’s panel. If it were not a criminal matter and therefore outwith the remit of the children’s panel, could there be a procedure to refer a matter to the Scottish Government’s children’s minister? That, albeit not a perfect remedy or disposal, would at least provide a route to take. I am just thinking out loud here; I have no expertise in this area at all. Would either of those possibilities, or other possibilities, be something that you might want to consider and come back to us on, given the current time constraints?

Good morning, cabinet secretary and witnesses. In his evidence, Alex Neil said that he believed that there was more than sufficient capital to deliver the project. He also set out a detailed statement about when each of the sections of the A9 was to be dualled. Why was that not adhered to? It was breached right from the start.

I appreciate that you were not responsible. I was part of the Government for a while, so I had a collective responsibility and I have never sought to shrug away from that. However, I never had a portfolio responsibility.

Why did it take five years from the critical watershed decision of the ONS, on which no statement was made to Parliament about how significant that was, even though you now say that that was the absolute critical moment? Why did it then take until 2019 for there to be a private finance plan? That was five years during which most of the work, or a very substantial proportion of it, according to Alex Neil’s plan, was supposed to have been done.

—all this work was supposed to have gone on and we have only seen two of the sections. Those are welcome, of course, but there is a complete absence of an explanation, cabinet secretary, about what went wrong. Can I just ask one final question?

It did not go ahead then either, did it? Has there been any review of the failure to adhere to the plan? Has there been any internal review by the Scottish Government—or anybody else, for that matter—as to why the timetable slipped and why there has been a failure to implement the very clear pledges that the Scottish National Party made repeatedly to the electorate at every election?

I understand all that, but with respect, that was not what I asked. I asked whether there was any review of any sort into the failure to deliver on our pledges in Government. Was there any review or not?