Chamber and committees

That completes my questions. I think that I just lost the last word or so of what you said, but I hope that everybody else heard you.

Good morning, Mr Avery. Can any lessons be learned by HIAL about the way in which it has handled the whole thing?

Good morning, Mr Henderson. I joined the committee only recently, so please forgive me if this question covers ground that might already have been covered in the history of the petition thus far. You are asking for an independent assessment to be carried out. Who do you think could conduct such an assessment? How might that person or persons be appointed?

I ask because it seems to me that the Civil Aviation Authority has the role of conducting a proper assessment of any proposal. Given that it is the statutory body that is charged with the responsibility of regulating air safety in the United Kingdom, and given the critical importance of that function, it is not immediately obvious to me who else could be expected to carry out an assessment of a system that, at the end of the day, is designed to protect people against air accidents, which would almost certainly result in fatalities. I would like to get a sense of how, in practice, an independent assessment could be carried out and who could do it.

That is very helpful. If you have further thoughts after the meeting, given that these questions are being sprung on you, we would be very keen to receive them.

I am sorry to interrupt. I got the gist of that—it is more a question about the financial and managerial aspects of how HIAL has failed thus far, as you see it. To be clear, in your view, should it be somebody in the Scottish Government who carries out that independent assessment?

I suppose I should declare a former interest, in that I was minister with responsibility for what has developed in respect of R100, or at least parts of it.

In addition to the recommendations from Alexander Stewart, with which I thoroughly concur, it might be helpful to approach the contractor—I think that BT has been awarded the contracts—to seek more practical information as to how it goes about the difficult task of sequencing and prioritising the roll-out of the work. The amount of work is considerable in each of the three areas, which all have separate contracts, so the matter is not straightforward at all.

Given that the programme is regulated by contracts, it might be helpful if, in writing to the Scottish Government—and, if colleagues agree, to the successful contractor, which I understand is BT—we were to ask specifically whether the relevant contractual provisions could be shared with us. I do not see any reason why they should not be; now that the tender process has been completed, they should be in the public domain. I just wanted to flesh out and expand on Mr Stewart’s suggestions.

It would be good to write to Scottish Forestry, too, because it has various enforcement responsibilities in respect of inappropriate felling, which was one of the issues that was raised.

As I said earlier, the petition has quite a long history. I have only recently become a member of the committee, but I have been aware of, and have followed, matters. It is plain that progress has been made, partly as a result of the work that Prospect has done and the engagement from MSPs and the petitioners. Do you feel that that progress has covered some of the defects—as you see them—that you have just described? In other words, are you confident that, going into the future, HIAL will listen more to staff and engage more with communities? As I understand it, you have been in the thick of it.

Yes. Those issues are hugely important to all the islands that are served by HIAL with what are, in many cases, lifeline services.

What about the financial side? Do you have an idea of how much HIAL has spent on the now-aborted air traffic management strategy?

Okay. Do you think that those figures should be made public, or are there good reasons why that should not be the case?