Chamber and committees

I thought that Mr Barnett’s comments were apposite and that we could perhaps learn from the cited example of the experience in England.

I want to ask about the establishment of an independent national whistleblowing officer. First, how would that help to address the concerns? Secondly, would a new public body be required to fulfil that function, or could that be made an explicit function of the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland?

Well, there would be civil unrest if the crofters were denied the right to extract peat from their own land. I think that that would be unthinkable to many of us.

I was pleased to hear Sarah Boyack say that, generally speaking, it is beneficial to have a factor rather than none. If you have no factor, common repairs, whether in a tenement or, for that matter, an estate where there is substantial common property to be maintained, can get neglected, and that will lead to huge problems. My experience of factors over 20 years in legal practice was that they had a bit of a thankless task, and the remuneration was generally modest in relation to the amount of work to be undertaken, the sheer amount of time spent on speaking to people and so on.

I have seen mostly good practice but, as I have said, members have received complaints, as indeed I have. However, I do think that many of the problems are not going to be solved by legal reform, because they are more practical difficulties. I might be a bit rusty, because it has been 20 years since I last practised, but as I understand it, if anyone is charging extortionate fees—which I think Sarah Boyack was suggesting in the example that she gave—there are existing legal remedies to challenge any grossly exorbitant fees for the provision of services. If services are worth, say, £1,000, you cannot charge £1 million for them, and people can, I believe, find a remedy through the sheriff court.

I am just not convinced that we are necessarily going to progress this issue through legislation, but I do support Mr Torrance’s recommendation that we find out whether the minister can make any further recommendations and that we see how the voluntary code of practice is getting on.

I hear what you say, but I am just not convinced. There was a complete failure to adhere to the very clear schedule of works and programming. It set out in which year every section would be done, and that was completely abandoned.

I think that we need to get at this because there was five years where—

Was he? I am sorry. I did not realise that.

Has there been any review? Has Transport Scotland not done a review of any sort? Has there been none whatsoever, despite the fact that this was the flagship pledge, and it has completely slipped? No review at all, is that right, Mr Shackman?

I will park it there, but I do not think—

Just standing back for a moment, the capital budget that is available to the Scottish Government each year is of the order of between £4,000 million to £5,000 million. It is reasonable to assume that that will continue to be the case. By 2035, which is 10 years, my maths suggest that there is a total of £40,000 million to £50,000 million available in the capital budget. The Highlands wants £3,700 million, which is less than 10 per cent of that total.

Why is the Scottish Government not making a clear cast-iron commitment or guarantee that, if MIM proves to be too expensive, for the reasons that the cabinet secretary has set out, a sum equivalent to less than one 10th of the total capital will be available for the Highlands, particularly since—this is just a matter of fact—there has been hardly any spending on roads projects in the Highlands since devolution? All the money has gone elsewhere. We have had a couple of roundabouts and a couple of small sections of dual carriageway.

Surely the Government recognises that it is the Highlands’ turn. If the Government cannot make a commitment that if MIM is too expensive traditional capital spend will be used, does that not suggest that the Highlands do not even merit a 10th of the total capital spend between now and 2035, a proposition that will simply not go down very well at all in my constituency or in the Highlands as a whole?

I will move on to a different point that Grahame Barn raised in some detail in his evidence. Unlike in the past, over the next 10 years, an enormous amount of civil engineering work is planned to be undertaken in Scotland, and in the Highlands in particular. We are looking at £40 billion on grid upgrades, £1 billion for Scottish Water and £3.5 billion for Network Rail to electrify the rail network. There is substantial civil engineering work involving Aventus Energy in Invergordon in renewables, and then there are the pumped storage contracts that SSE and others plan.

The reason why I raise that is that Grahame Barn pointed out that that means that there will be a big choice of work for civil engineers and, arguably, some of the other works that I have mentioned may be more profitable than roads contracts, where the profit margins typically have at best been 3 per cent, although that has never been achieved in the past several years according to CECA.

What is the Government’s view? Is there a real risk that even if we assume that the money is available, there will not be the companies, the people and the expertise to carry it out, because they will be too busy doing other more profitable work, which we all hope will be able to be done as well?