Infrastructure Procurement
Debate between Alan Brown and Dave Doogan(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Alan Brown
I agree with the hon. Member wholeheartedly. The Faroese have to be commended for the work that they have done on transport connectivity. There are certainly some lessons that Transport Scotland can learn from that. Perhaps we need to be bolder going forward in terms of what transport connectivity looks like in Scotland.
I shall briefly return to the ferries. It is quite clear from what I have outlined that there has been well over £100 billion in overspend across a few UK projects. The overspend on the ferries in Scotland suddenly becomes loose change down the back of the couch in comparison. Indeed, the overspend in capital costs of the ferries is equivalent to the money given to PPE Medpro, for which Baroness Mone received a healthy £20 million dividend. Indeed, it was the UK Government who awarded a ferry contract to a company with no ferries for £33 million. That puts a lot of things in perspective.
The reality is that the ferries in Scotland are a microcosm of the failures of so many UK Government major programmes. In Scotland, there was the political intervention to rightly save commercial non-military shipbuilding on the Clyde. However, the actual procurement process seems to have been too rushed. It was inadequately specified by Caledonian Maritime Assets Limited and then all the numerous changes to design increased the costs. That is what happens time and again in major infrastructure projects. We really must look at some of those in more detail, study what went wrong and see what needs to change going forward.
Let us start with HS2. The original business case and proposals were for it to extend to Scotland to help with a modal shift away from flying. This was to improve business productivity, which was based on assumptions that getting to London quicker limited down time, without considering the fact that many people now work on the move anyway.
Through time, the argument was then advanced that HS2 was needed to free up capacity on existing lines, particularly the west coast main line, thereby creating more capacity for both passenger and freight services. That principle is fine, and getting more freight delivered by train is good for decarbonisation, but what the different arguments and analysis mean is that there was never an established rationale for the key outcomes for HS2. That has made it easier, as part of the inherent north-south bias of a London Government, to make phase 1 of the project the London to Birmingham link, and to make that the most important aspect.
Dave Doogan (Angus) (SNP)
My hon. Friend touches on HS2. I know that he will speak about many more projects, but this is a gusting £100 billion project that was designed to connect the whole length of Great Britain. We knew that we were getting nothing out of it in Scotland. Manchester is disappointed, because it thought that it was getting something out of it. Birmingham was the best connected city to London anyway; it now has another railway line, but one that does not quite make it to London. My constituents in Angus will be footing £92 million of the £100 billion. We could do with a link to Laurencekirk. We could do with fixing the erosion on the Montrose Links. We could do with getting better flood defences in Brechin. We do not know where that money will come from, but we still have to fund £92 million of HS2. Does my hon. Friend think that that is right?
Alan Brown
I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. It is almost like, when we look back historically, the oil and gas revenues paid for HS1 and the channel tunnel, but at the time we were assured that there would be a spur up the east coast and a spur up the west coast of high-speed rail. Now, all these decades later, we still do not have the promised spine, but as he rightly says London and Birmingham are getting better connectivity, even though there is some ambiguity about where the line will terminate in London.
We were told not to worry, and that the Birmingham upgrades would still mean much quicker journey times from Scotland to London. We were assured several times that trains will run from London to Scotland on day one of HS2 services, even though they will be going from Birmingham. Sure, trains to Edinburgh and Glasgow will run, but they are intended to run as one service stopping and decoupling at Carstairs. That is just deemed a minor inconvenience for those of us travelling to and from Scotland.
When HS2 looked at the purchase of rolling stock, the key decision was made that they had to be the quickest high-speed trains. That means that when that rolling stock accesses the existing tracks on the west coast main line, the trains will go slower than existing Avanti west coast services. Not only will we not get high-speed rail to Scotland, we will get a poorer service from the new high-speed rail once it is running on the west coast main line. How can that be a logical proposal for the most expensive infrastructure project ever undertaken by a UK Government?
Dave Doogan
Is my hon. Friend concerned, as I am, that the UK Government—specifically, the Treasury—seem not to have any concern for nuclear overspends? When it comes to nuclear, regardless of whether it is civil or military, there is no shortage of UK Government funding, yet all across GB there are plans for massive pylon lines going through communities. The pylon lines could be offshored but have to be done at the lowest possible cost, which means overhead lines. There is no parity between nuclear and anything else. Everything else is bargain-basement, Treasury Green Book “let’s screw the contractor down to the very lowest price”, except for nuclear.
Alan Brown
Again—no surprise—I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. It is classic “penny wise, pound foolish” all the time, particularly when it comes to nuclear. The Government are kidding themselves about nuclear, because they still estimate that Sizewell C will cost only £20 billion. We already know that Hinkley, which is the model for Sizewell C, is costing nearly £50 billion, so why pretend that it will cost only £20 billion? They are setting their stall out wrongly and have a blinkered approach that suggests we somehow need nuclear, when clearly we do not actually need it. What they should be investing in is renewable energy, storage systems and, as my hon. Friend says, much better grid infrastructure as well.
Alan Brown
I absolutely agree. It goes back to the fact that an independent country making its own decisions would plan strategically and be able to borrow money accordingly. Quite often, borrowing for infrastructure leads to the kind of circular reinvestment in job creation that is a win-win.
If we look at roads, we see that it was the SNP that finally delivered a continuous motorway between Edinburgh and Glasgow. The M74 and the M80 have been completed, as has the Queensferry crossing. Yes, if we listen to the headlines, the A9 has clearly been delayed: a much more realistic programme for the A9 should have been developed before now, and Transport Scotland should also have heeded industry concerns about its bespoke contract models making it difficult for contractors to bid. However, the reality is that the SNP Government have delivered on a limited budget, and while the Tories demand more and more, they are also content with the capital allocation being cut over the next two years.
Dave Doogan
I am glad that my hon. Friend has mentioned the A9. Under the Scotland Office, prior to devolution, it came to an abrupt halt at Luncarty, with sporadic dual carriageway between there and Inverness. Like the Borders railway, when the SNP said that we were going to dual it, the Tory Opposition in the Scottish Parliament—having done nothing about it themselves—immediately insisted that we were not doing it quick enough. Does my hon. Friend agree that the problem is that there is such a lack of capital infrastructure investment across these islands that, when it comes to major projects such as the dualling of the A9, it is so difficult to mobilise the expertise, skills, contractors, and plant and machinery? There just is not the culture of investment in the United Kingdom that other European nations demonstrate.
Alan Brown
Absolutely. I have long said that when oil was discovered in the north-east of Scotland and the Port of Nigg was developed as a strategic port, any normal country would then have invested in the infrastructure in between. That is when the A9 should have been dualled—when the oil and gas revenues were piling in, and we were using the north-east of Scotland to facilitate that. There should have been a motorway built to Aberdeen, the oil capital of Europe, but the UK Government did not think of upgrading the road or train network to Aberdeen. It is utterly bonkers.
That “bonkers” brings me to the fact that the UK Government are now supposed to be delivering a levelling-up agenda. As we have just heard, that agenda has certainly bypassed Scotland for long enough, but it is another example of political aspirations and a desire to be seen throwing some money about, instead of actually having a coherent strategy based on needs. The UK Government’s levelling-up strategies have imposed strict spending timetables and budget caps that do not allow for inflation, meaning that councils that have been allocated money now have to come up with additional money themselves or cut back on those so-called levelling-up projects, which kind of defeats the purpose of allocating money for those projects.
When we look at projects in the round, it is also critical that the correct funding mechanisms are in place. Labour gave us the private finance initiative model, which proved to be a boon for hedge funds but a complete rip-off for the taxpayer. Again, the SNP Scottish Government learned the lessons from that model and implemented the non-profit distributing public-private partnership model, limiting profits and allowing much greater expenditure on capital projects while not tying hands with revenue budgets.
Cost of Living
Debate between Alan Brown and Dave Doogan(11 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Dave Doogan
In a minute.
It is not just the fishers, because Angus is the garden of Scotland and its farmers are subject to the real constraints of Brexit. People talk about farmers as though they are just a guy with a tractor, but modern agricultural enterprise is a vast undertaking involving plant and seed suppliers, as well as any amount of different subcontractors and small businesses, so when I talk about agriculture I am talking about hundreds of small businesses across Scotland, and thousands across the United Kingdom.
My farmers in Scotland are subject to the UK Internal Market Act 2020, for which my colleagues in the Scottish Government would not give legislative consent, because it is so damaging to Scottish agriculture, even before the introduction of the Australia trade deal on top of it, which undercuts with lower standards. That has created a market in which we cannot possibly compete, where they do volume and we do quality. Scottish agriculture is different to English agriculture, which is much bigger. We do not do bulk in Scotland, which gets to the heart of how broken the Union is. Did the UK Government try to construct that system to promote enterprise, jobs and prosperity in agriculture in Scotland? No, they did not. They did it on the basis of their ideology.
Turning back to business investment, where there is a thriving business community, there are jobs and upward pressure on wages. That is what we need to get people out of poverty—
Alan Brown
Will my hon. Friend give way to the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine)?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Alan Brown and Dave Doogan(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
Dave Doogan (Angus) (SNP)