Chamber and committees

I will just leave that there.

Where he is absolutely right is that, in the period around the financial crash and after that, infrastructure was a central priority of the Government. Infrastructure is always a priority of the Government but, in terms of the economic situation that we were facing, trying to drive economic activity through infrastructure projects was absolutely a central focus, and Alex was absolutely pushing that.

As I say, I think that my reputation is probably that I was more of a hands-on micromanager than my predecessor was. I would be involved in issues that needed to be resolved or pushed on. Cabinet secretaries would come to me and I would go to cabinet secretaries where there were issues or where I thought that things were not moving fast enough. That is the nature of how Government works on a day-to-day basis.

Where I would take issue with how you have characterised it is that a lot of the work was on-going at that point. Much of the preparatory work, to use that catch-all phrase, was on-going. We are now in a position where, with the exception of one of the sections of the route, all the orders are in place, so it is not the case that none of that was progressing.

The six-year estimate, of course, was made way back—it was an estimate of the construction period. The significant barrier that we were grappling with at that point was around funding options, in terms of coming up with a private finance possibility versus the pressure on our capital programme. You can have everything else in place—you can have all the preparatory work done—but you need to have routes to funding and procurement. That was the aspect that was the most significant challenge.

I do not think that that would add anything to where we are right now. In fact, I am concerned that, if somebody came in and decided to take a fresh look at everything, that would slow things down. The Government is now in a strong place with funding, the reassessment of the order of the routes and the timescale of the project, so it should be able to get on with that work and be held to account for it. Therefore, that suggestion would hinder rather than help.

If that is practical, yes, I would agree. I have not been in government for more than a year, so it would not be fair of me to comment on whether, if we take all the different factors into account, it is practical. However, if it is, the Government should try to accelerate the timescale. John Swinney’s constituency is on the route of the A9. I am certain that, if it was practical to bring forward completion, he would be very open to doing it, but it is important that I not try to speak for the Government or the First Minister, given that I am not at all close to the detail of those things in the way that I once was.

Indeed.

The impact of Covid on the A9 project would have been multifaceted, as it was on every aspect of Government priorities outside what was required to manage Covid. It would have impacted civil service time and wider industry engagement. Everything associated with a big project would have been and was impacted by Covid.

Again, I am using shorthand here, which is probably always a bit dangerous, but, effectively, outside what we needed to do to deal with Covid—this applied not just here but everywhere—the rest of Government shut down to some extent. That, of course, impacted on the A9 project, as it did on many other things.

I do not particularly want to think about climbing—sorry. [Laughter.]

I would be supportive of that proposal. It would be appropriate. We tend to have memorials to disastrous tragedies that lead to a significant loss of life in a single incident, which is entirely appropriate, but we do not do the same with loss of life over longer periods in situations such as the one that we are speaking about, and we should.

My views on that have possibly been strengthened by the Covid experience. I know from talking to bereaved families, because of my close involvement in that experience, how important it is to have recognition and somewhere that people can go to reflect, remember and come to terms with their grief. The importance of that cannot be overstated. Therefore, the proposal would and does have my general support.

On the process, I again draw from the experience of Covid to some extent. It would be wrong and inappropriate for Government to decide what that should be. The starting point in any such process should be engagement with people who have lost loved ones or who live on the route of the A9—those with, to use the term, lived experience of the loss that we seek to commemorate—and the process should work from there.

Memorials take many different forms. As you said, we all have particular images in our minds when we talk about memorials, but there are lots of Covid memorials that are open spaces, gardens and places where people simply go to reflect. Therefore, it would be important to properly understand what would be meaningful for people who have lost loved ones on the A9.

No—I think that we have covered everything that I expected us to cover. There were a couple of moments when I rather rashly offered to provide more written information. It would be good if the committee could remind me of those, as I no longer have an army of civil servants sitting behind me to remind me later.

This is probably a classic politician’s answer—I am trying not to give those—but, if it is possible, it is both. It is absolutely fair for people in the Highlands to say that the A9 should have been prioritised above the other demands on the capital budget. If I was living in the Highlands, there is no doubt that I would have that view, so I am not in any way suggesting that that is somehow an unfair view for Highlanders to hold.

The other side of it relates to the way that you posed that question to me. I understand why you did it—you are speaking on behalf of your constituents, so I am not criticising that in any way—but you were in the Government for many years, so you know that to point to a big budget when speaking about a particular project that is small, relative to the size of the budget, and say, “Well, why couldn’t that have been done?” does not fully encapsulate the budgeting process.

For most, if not all, of the time that I was in the Government, the demands on the capital budget exceeded the quantum of it. Fergus Ewing knows that as well as I do, because of his time in the Government. Within that, there is a legitimate question about the relative priority that is given to different projects, but in the process of budgeting we try to balance all of those things to progress everything that we want to do, and that will inevitably lead to supporters of different projects feeling, at times, that their project is not getting the priority that it needs.

However, it is not a fair characterisation of how such things work to simply point to the size of the budget and the cost of the A9 and somehow say that there was no problem with funding through our capital programme.