 Good morning and welcome to the second meeting of the Public Audit and Post Legislative Scrutiny Committee in 2017. Can I ask everyone to switch off their electronic devices or switch them to silent mode, please, so that they do not affect the committee's work this morning? Item 1, our first item today is to decide whether to take item 3 in private. Do members agree? Gweithio ymateb i gael oedden nhw'n ddwylltyn nhw'n ddweud o'r gweithio cymysgau i Gwyrdd Cymysgol a'r Gwyrdd Cymysgol yn oedden nhw'n ddweud o'r gweithio i Gwyrdd Cymysgol, a'r gweithio i Gwyrdd Cymysgol. Ieithaf i gael o'r gweithio i Gwyrdd Cymysgol, director general economi a'r Gwyrdd Cymysgol, Roy Branan, chief executive, Hugh Gillies, director o'r Trunk Roads a'r Bus Operations and Donald Morrison, head of asset management and procurement all of Transport Scotland. Unfortunately, Cullen Mayer was not able to make the meeting this morning due to transport complications that were not of his making. We highlight in advance of today's meeting five areas arising from the audit that we would like to discuss in more detail. I invite Liz Ditch Burn to make an opening statement before I open up to questions from members. Thank you very much, convener, and thank you for the opportunity to give evidence. My remarks focus on the trunk roads network for which Scottish Government through Transport Scotland is directly responsible. Our trunk road network is used daily for hundreds of thousands of journeys and is vital to our economic prosperity. It represents only 6 per cent of the road network but carries over 35 per cent of all traffic and over 60 per cent of HGV traffic. It has a gross asset value of £20.8 billion. If something goes wrong with this network, it can impact on large numbers of people very quickly, as indeed we have seen this morning, and have serious economic consequences. The Audit Scotland report highlights the importance of decision makers being able to make informed choices about the balance of investment in new infrastructure and in the existing network, and it highlights the importance of managing our maintenance activity effectively to get value for the public purse. I believe that the successive audit reports, of which this is part of a series, help to show how Transport Scotland has developed a mature asset management approach embodied in the road asset management plan and a strong model of oversight of the asset, including through the independent performance audit group. Transport Scotland has developed long-term financial models that allow us to understand both the budget required to achieve various condition targets and the impact of different levels of investment on condition. Since the committee took evidence from Audit Scotland, the latest annual report of the performance audit group has been published with the 2015-16 data on performance of the operating companies, and I hope that you have access to that. The last few years have seen a really clear strategy of significant investment in our transport infrastructure to create a platform for economic growth and as an economic stimulus in its own right. Alongside these major projects, Transport Scotland has rigorously managed our available maintenance spend to get the most from it through effective procurement, performance management and targeting. But when decision makers come to look at the next phase of our transport infrastructure strategy, Transport Scotland have the data and analysis to model and assess different options and to inform what may well be in a constrained financial setting difficult choices. In the short term, information about the maintenance needs of the network resulted in an additional £15 million for trunk road maintenance in 2016-17 as part of the £100 million capital package announced in September. The draft budget for 17-18, which of course is going through parliamentary process, proposes an increase from the £305 million spent in total this year on management, maintenance and operation of the trunk road network to a proposed £368 million. Although not within the scope of the original Audit Scotland report, the committee has been very interested and keen to understand, I know, more about the response to the allegations made against Bayer, one of our operating companies. We take allegations of this nature extremely seriously and commissioned a full investigation and have acted on its findings. In assessing future risk, I draw assurance from Audit Scotland's view that the performance audit group provides the basis of a robust system of internal control over the operating companies and that Transport Scotland acted appropriately when it received the allegations. If the committee would find it helpful, we can give much more detail about the further work done by Bayer and Transport Scotland as a result of this case. I am also very happy to talk to all the questions that you have raised. Indeed, I am very confident that my colleagues between them represent many years of expertise and experience in this area. I am sure that I am looking forward to a really good evidence session. I would like to ask Colin Beattie to open up questioning. I think that the thing that strikes me looking at this is the complexity of the landscape that we see in front of us. There are 33 roads authorities, so I understand from the submission by roads collaboration programme. It is pretty calm there, but perhaps I can ask you some questions on this. We have 33 roads authorities. There is apparent complexity of political decision making for the Scottish report itself on paragraph 47 that only a third of councils are presenting options to elected members on the road condition that can be expected from different levels of spending, which seems a pretty obvious option to go in front of members. How efficient are local councils? How efficient is the present system of delivering for a road system? Maybe if I just start really briefly, but colleagues should talk to this in much more detail. I think that the Audit Scotland report shows really clearly the kinds of elements that should be in place in terms of good asset management, so understanding the condition of the asset, understanding its value, being able to make informed decisions about costs and how expenditure should be used. Audit Scotland recognises that Transport Scotland, with respect to the trunk roads, has been able to go a long way down that journey of having that really mature process. The report also says very clearly that councils are currently in a very different, very variable states of capability and distance down that journey. The report shows clearly that there is variability, that the overall system is not working as anybody would want it to do in its totality, and there are some real important opportunities with the next generation of contracts that we will be coming to in due course, which create different options for different kinds of models. However, let me ask Roy Orhugh to speak to that in more detail. Yes, thank you. It is quite a difficult picture and it is probably not one for us to answer in specifically around efficiency of the local authorities. However, what I will do is go back a bit to 2011 when we set up the national roads maintenance review of 33 of us and I chaired that review. The outcome of that was 30 options, option 30 being to look at collaboration and shared services. It is suffice to say that Audit Scotland recognised that there is still a way to go yet until we truly get to a point where we have true efficiencies coming through the make-up of how we undertake trunk road maintenance and local authority maintenance across the piece. There are some good examples of collaboration with our own trunk road contracts. I was with Argyll and Bute yesterday, and Argyll and Bute have a collaborative approach to trunk road maintenance on the kind of crate to Campbelltown section, as they do trans-serve with Dumfries and Galloway. There are pockets of good activity. The airshares are another good example of that, but I think that there is more to be done. That is really the task of the strategic action group, chaired by the minister and Stephen Hagan, to try and determine exactly how we get that pace into collaboration going forward. It might not answer your question directly around efficiencies, but I think that everybody recognises that there is more to be done. I could add that it is true to say that we obviously have 33 rose authorities in Scotland, and is that the best model to go forward? As Roy has said, it is not for us to comment directly on local government and how they have gone about rose administration in recent times, given the fiscal challenge that they have faced as we have. However, if you look at it another way, if you were to start with a blank but paper, would you come up with 33 rose authorities for Scotland? I think that the answer would be no. Do you believe that there should be one national authority for all roads? That has been put out there as a thought piece, but I think that in terms of what should be looked at is that we need a mature reflection through the strategic action group to look at potential models that could come forward. That is obviously one model to be looked at, but there are other models that are being looked at, for example regional models. I think that a conversation needs to be had around models that are fit for purpose for varying parts of Scotland. It is not a one-size-fits-all. I think that that would be one of the thoughts that would have to be taken forward. I think that that is entirely right. It cannot be a one-size-fits-all model. A good example of that was in the discussion that I had with Argyll and Butte yesterday, where they indicated that, if we did end up in a situation where trunk road expertise, local authority expertise, professional expertise, was taken out of Argyll and Butte in a situation where they have an ageing population and they are trying to retain the population in the area, that would be a difficult model for them. I think that it has to be recognised that there are different approaches required across the piece. One of the things that we have set up as part of the SAG is a task force to look at how we can work closely together with our local authority colleagues through the further procurement of the fifth generation of our operating company contract. That is one avenue, but there are other avenues that I am sure Colin would have wished to explore today if he was here. Liz Ditchburn mentioned about new contracts. New contracts are not going to solve the problems. They may hopefully improve a bit of efficiency and oversight and all the rest of it, but they are not going to resolve all these issues. Well, I was referring to the same point that Roy was there. At the point at which we moved from one set of contracts to whatever follows it, you have an opportunity at that point to explore and put in place different models. The next generation of contracts would need to start in more or less what sort of timing. It comes in at being in 2020, but we start working on it now. So working back from that, there are opportunities now and over the course of this year to sit down in these collaborative forums that exist and that are working to look at what would be the best ways of structuring the whole system, and then what would the implications be for the kind of contracts that we would need to let. So there is an open window there to say, as you move from one generation of contract to another, you have the opportunity to rethink. There is just a mature reflection that Hugh was talking about to say, let's really look at what the options might be and look at how they would fit within the context of different areas within Scotland and different challenges, but that's an option. I think there's probably, I would say that there's two things working in tandem here, and if Colin was here, he would explain a bit more about the road collaboration programme, and I think he's mentioned in his submission about the governance first project, and that's the project that's looking at sharing on a regional basis across council boundaries and setting up governance arrangements to enable that to happen. That's obviously something that's been taken forward by the board, and the other thing that's happening, of course, is preparation for the next round of trunk road contracts, but these two things can happen in tandem, because obviously with trunk road contracts coming to an end in 2020, we have to be in a position to ensure continuation of service, so that procurement journey has to start almost now. In doing that, we're also exploring between Transport Scotland and local authorities through the Scots network, the society of chief officer transportation, we're exploring what opportunities there would be to collaborate through the contract, but at the same time the governance first project is looking at regional arrangements, so these two things will continue in tandem, and obviously in developing contracts we can be flexible in terms of what the outcome of that is. Reference has been made to shared services, but, you know, frankly, those committees looked at various organisations, local government and so on, and shared services have not been a huge success. Why will shared services work in the roads network, if it's not working particularly well, I'll swear? I think again, if Colin was here, and I think, you know, we obviously talked to our colleagues in the local authorities, and we do share, we have examples of Roy was referencing, we share and shared services are going on view, we have also in the case of the peace and gallery, and we have pockets of it, but I think Colin would say, and I think I would reflect on the fact that shared services can work on occasions, if that, again, it's that, horses for courses, but it's not going to be the panacea, we understand that. So it'll work for some, in some instances, but not always the case. And where it doesn't work, what do you do? Well, that's the opportunity to reflect back. Clearly, as I say, if councils are having difficulties now in delivering their services for a variety of reasons, some of that's about fiscal, some of it's about professional persons available, there is an acknowledgement through the national review that we're heading towards a challenge of Scotland, just having enough transport and engineering professionals. So again, that's part of that mature reflection that we need to have about how do we map out the future of road administration in Scotland at national, regional and local level? There must be a timescale for coming to some sort of conclusion on that. I realise there's local government review in the background on this also, but in the shorter term, perhaps, what sort of timescale are we looking at to try and achieve some sort of consensus as to how we handle our road system? I think that if I could come in on that one, I think that we've probably got, I would say, a two-year window to look at the scope of shared services and where the governance first project might go. That would take us towards the tail end of 2018. At that point, if that hasn't developed sufficiently, at that point, you're pressing the button on trunk road maintenance contracts. Obviously, you have to go out to the market and run a procurement, and we would need a good 18 months to do that if we were to deliver new trunk road maintenance contracts in time to ensure continuation of service. Before we press the button, before Transport Scotland presses the button on the procurement process itself, we've probably got about two years to look at what opportunities there are for Transport Scotland and local authorities to collaborate through a 5G contract. At the same time, the governance first project has an opportunity to take forward a remit to look at shared services on a regional basis. Over the next two years, that's the critical period that we've got from an activity point of view. What does Scotland report refer to, which is the strategic action group publishing an update on the recommendations and the work done to date before the end of December 2017? I think that that's the place where we'll want to—the strategic action group will want to be very clear about what might those options look like and what progress is being made. The roads collaboration programme was launched in 2013. It doesn't sound as if a whole lot of progress has been made since then, or is that incorrect? I think that there has been some progress. Obviously, the governance first project has been set up. That's been successful in setting up—I'm right in saying that Colin would need to have confirmed it, but I'd be right in saying that all 32 local authorities are signed up to a regional group in some shape or form, so there's nobody excluded from that. Some have agreed shadow joint committees and the like, so I think that there has been progress in setting up a governance arrangement where they maybe haven't got over the line is actually putting those things in getting it through chief executives, so that's kind of the next stage. So there's been progress there. We're 2017 now. If it was set up in November 2013, they've just agreed to set up a process. I mean, it's not much progress for three years. I would totally agree with that, and that's exactly what Audit Scotland is saying in the report, is that progress has been slow. So the challenge is obviously there for local authorities and Transport Scotland to pick up the pace on that. Why has that progress been slow? It's difficult to say. I mean, I think that there seems to have been an inertia in getting it going and getting people around the table to actually make progress, but I think that at an officer level they've been keen to make progress and in putting together arrangements and looking at projects such as skills gaps and future resource pressures. There's a separate project running on that, so officers have been keen on making progress on that, but it's getting it going, getting approval at a higher level, to push it along. I think that's probably been the risk. From chief executives? Well, that's my impression. As I say, we really need Colin to speak to those matters, but I'm just sort of giving a kind of an outside view on that. If Colin was here, he'd probably, as an independent chair, if you like, off the road collaboration board, he'd probably give you a more fuller response on what his views are in terms of the pace of change. It's not for the lack of effort from officers. I would say that there's a great deal of understanding about the condition and asset, the skills that are required to deal with it, but we are in terms of that position on pace and what it's gotland has recognised that again. If there's one thing that's come out of this, it'll be a new impetus again for the strategic action group for elected members to try and drive this on and come back by the end of this year with a firmer plan about how we move towards a different model. In our defence and transport Scotland, the 4G contracts have a collaboration element built into the contract. We proactively ask our OCs to try and look for opportunities. There is a mechanism in which we can try and force the pace, if you like, but we have set up the task force to try and see whether we can actively get people involved in the development of the 5G contracts as we head towards 2020. However, I think that the correct structure is in place with the strategic action group. Ross Thomson Thank you, convener. I also declare an interest as a serving councillor on Aberdeen City Council. The Audit Scotland report highlights that the condition of trunk roads has declined from 90 per cent in acceptable condition in 2011-12 to 87 per cent in 2014-15. Over that very same period, transport Scotland's expenditure on the trunk road maintenance fell from £168 million in 2011-12 to £162 million in 2014-15. Therefore, it's a straightforward question to begin with. Do you agree that there is a direct correlation between road condition and the level of spend? I think that the honest answer is yes. We have recognised that. Depending on the level of investment that you put into your assets, that determines exactly what happens in terms of the asset condition. We have a very good understanding of our assets across the trunk road network. Donald and the team do a huge amount of work and effort in trying to identify each part of the inventory. We have 87,000 gullys, 12,000 kilometres of lines, a huge amount of assets. It is understanding that asset first and foremost and identifying the best time to intervene with the funds that are available. That is the position that we are in at the minute. We are continuing with the level of funding that we have at the minute in maintaining a reasonable condition. We are bubbling on over at the same 84-86 per cent over the past few years, slowing down the deterioration, but certainly no significant improvement. That is obviously correct to say. The focus of our asset management plan in our maintenance programmes is getting the best value out of the pounds that we are spending. Obviously, we will talk about the performance of operating companies and how that is scrutinised and the performance measures that are in there and the various things that they have to do to prove value for money for the maintenance programmes that they are putting forward. That obviously influences getting the best value for the pound, but, as Roy says, it is probably the biggest influencing factor on road condition investment. It is probably no surprise. Following on from the submission from the road's collaborative programme to the committee, it states in a quote from it, that, in recognition of concerns over local road condition in England, the UK Government Chancellor has chosen to invest in the local roads network in England. A similar allocation to Scotland's roads would be timely. The investment that is being referred to in that submission is £168 million pothole repair fund for 148 English local authorities, with the aim being to fill more than 3 million potholes. In 2014, I wrote to John Swinney at the time, asking if the Scottish Government would even consider investigating the possibility of replicating a similar scheme. In August 2014, the response was no. Has the Scottish Government looked at exploring the potential for such a scheme? Do you think that looking at the response from the Audit Scotland and about the deterioration at now is the time that we should look at whether or not this is something that could be applicable in Scotland? I ask Roy to talk explicitly to what we haven't looked at at different times, but I think that it's really important to state the obvious, which is that these are the choices that Governments have to make. There are no easy choices. If the entire purpose of the Government was to make sure that the road condition was absolutely in the best condition possible and we weren't trying to do anything else, then it would be straightforward. As you know, we are always trying to balance different things. I think that, as I said at the beginning, there has been a very clear strategy here of a major investment in a new infrastructure. Alongside that, a really smart use of the maintenance budget to get the absolute maximum out of that maintenance budget. Although, obviously, the overall level of investment is a major determinant of the condition of the roads, then you can use that money well or less well. Let's not forget how you use that money really matters as well in terms of what you get back from it. I think what we've got is a pattern of a really major investment in new projects and alongside that, an increasingly effective use of the maintenance budget. Obviously, there will come decisions into the future around at what point you need to flip that and change that and at what point there are elements of critical parts of the network, critical parts of infrastructure that you absolutely need to move into a potentially quite significant asset renewal phase. I think Roy might want to say a bit more about that overall dynamic. Our roads and the nature of our roads might determine a different pattern than the expenditure that's happened in England. The decisions that were right for England were taken by the UK Government. It doesn't mean to say that we should necessarily replicate that. We need to think about our asset, our network, what's right for Scotland and what the dynamic might be over a series of years. Roy, would you like to say more? We haven't done any specific work on a particular fund for local authorities. The agreed position is that the block grant approach is given to local authorities, and it's up to them how they spend that. Liz is right in terms of our approach. Mr Neil will be aware of that, but the infrastructure investment plan set out a path of targeting new capital investment in our trunk road network, as well as continuing to maintain. We're starting to see the tail end of that now, so we've got £2.6 billion pounds worth of investment coming to fruition in the next year or so, which is equivalent to 126 kilometres of new carriageway. That will improve the asset condition undoubtedly, because we've got a section of the MA, M73, M74, which will come on-stream, as well as the new M90 across the Queensferry crossing. That will make a difference. Hand in hand, it's right to have a balance between new infrastructure and asset renewal sums of money, but, as Liz says, there will become a point in time when we need to adjust that ratio ever so slightly to ensure that our aging asset is dealt with accordingly. A good example of that is the condition of our motorways at the minute. We've had a 2 per cent improvement on the last year, so we're in a decent place, but our motorways are quite aging, so a lot of them were built in the early 60s and 70s, M90, M74, parts of the M74 and parts of the MA. That will require investment in the short to medium term. On the pothole issue coming back to that one, in the absence of a pothole fund, what the Scottish Government has chosen to do in the past, and I know that it predates your 2014 request, they have made one-off ad hoc awards to a pothole fund in year. I probably all remember the severe winters of 2010 and 2011. In the spring of both those years, the Scottish Government gave ring-fence pothole money to local authorities and to Transport Scotland. It was £5 million the first year and £15 million the following year, so those were fairly sizable sums that were admittedly one-off, but they were specifically for potholes. Another example of that more recently was last winter after the flooding events. There was £5 million of emergency flooding money made available to the estate infrastructure, and Aberdeenshire got quite a lot. They had one road in particular, the A93. There was a failure there with a road washed away in the flooding, so quite a bit of the money went into that. The Scottish Government tends to deal with specific pressures as and when they come with relation to potholes rather than setting up an intention to set up a pothole fund. I know that there has also been mention of investment in new roads infrastructure. Recent transport services show that about 84 per cent of Scots would prefer to see investment in the current roads infrastructure and believe that there needs to be more investment in the existing roads network. Given that that fund introduced by the UK Government was in 2014 and now we are in 2017, has the Government at all carried out any analysis in relation to the impact that that fund has had in England? In relation to best practice, I suspect that my roads officers in Aberdeen will always be looking at what is happening in other authorities to learn of new practices that we can introduce as transport Scotland has done the same in relation to the policy. Not in relation to local authority roads, but we are taking a watching brief on the development in relation to the strategic network. Highways Agency became Highways England in 2015 with a particular direction and fund to improve the condition of their network, 80 per cent of their network by the end of the first reporting period, which is 2019-20. So we are watching carefully how that model works, that investment. The important point to get across here, and it is one that was made through the national roads maintenance review, is that certainty of budgets over a longer period of time will make that difference both to the supply chain and to the asset. That is exactly what Highways England has been set up to do, so it is a go-co arms-length company, but their direction is to improve the condition of the strategic network. As I said, we are watching that closely to see if that is going to have a dramatic impact. Can you carry out some analysis on the impact of the Potholderfair fund in the UK? That would be possible. Yes, I think that we could do that through the UK roads board. Both Transport Scotland and Scots are represented on the UK roads board. That group involves representatives from English local authorities. Through that group, we could certainly get feedback and we could write to you with that when we get it. I think that the Audit Scotland report does make comparisons in spend. The current position that it identifies for roads in England, for local roads in England, and for trunk roads, is that the condition is stable and has been for the past few years? I have added the only thing that is mentioned in the Audit Scotland report on that. It is probably no surprise that, as an MSP, one of the concerns that you hear most regularly from constituents is about the condition of roads. That is not just residents but businesses, particularly in Aberdeen. If we continue to see roads spend at its current level, or if we actually see it reduced, what is the consequence that is going to be for road maintenance going into the future? The main thing to say is that, as we spoke about earlier, investment is directly related to road condition. We would continue with our value management processes to identify the most important schemes to do. It might have an influence on our road condition indicator, so road condition may—what we are doing at the moment is arresting a decline, so it would be more difficult to do that if the investment was not there, but probably the most obvious impact would be that, instead of doing planned major maintenance work, which can restore the long-term life of the asset, we would be doing more in the way of short-term treatments. We would be doing a lot of patching and resurfacing-type schemes, rather than where a road comes to the end of its life. You dig it out and you completely replace it, and that will restore its design life for 20 or even up to 40 years, if it is a long life payment. In the absence of that, we continue to keep our roads safe by doing shorter-term treatments, and in that way we can keep the customer service going, if you like. Can I add to that that you mentioned business, that we place a great stock in making sure that we have good relationship with business, particularly the freight side? We have a very good relationship with the freight transport association and the road haulage association, and working with them in further efforts to protect our network. The local road network is what we are introducing an initiative that is being rolled out just now. We are using new technology to monitor overweight vehicles, which may be on our network. We know that they are on our network. Generally speaking, roads and bridges in the United Kingdom of Scotland are built for a standard 44-ton vehicle. That is the design standard, but we know from research and from looking around the world that there is probably about 5 per cent of the HGV fleet that runs about 10 per cent over its maximum allowable weight. Disproportionately, that eats into the life of an asset, be it the road itself or affects the structure, and that cannot continue. To be fair, the road haulage association and the freight transport association recognise that. We are working with the driver standards vehicle agency, the United Kingdom organisation, Police Scotland, ourselves, the traffic commissioner, to come together as an alliance. This is not to criminalise logistics companies. This is to get to drive good behaviours, and we will be able to do that by having what we call way in motion as vehicles travel along the network, an automatic number recognition, and we will start with five locations in Scotland. I am not going to divulge them in committee, you will understand, but that will allow us to understand what is happening in terms of those overweight vehicles. Through those agencies, we will be able to approach logistics companies and just let them know that they are running about heavy, and they might want to change their behaviours. That is interesting. I hope that they listen, unlike the driver who went over the fourth crossing recently. On a slightly different tact, it has obviously been mentioned whether having 32 different road authorities is sometimes the most practical or best way of trying to ensure maintenance of the roads. My question would be just from my own experience at a local level, an council level, having those decisions taken at the localist levels sometimes can be the most effective because they understand the road network, understand the community. Is there not an argument that sometimes it is better to have those decisions taken at the localist possible level? I think there is probably a distinction there between that. You are absolutely right. I think that there is a need for that local accountability, governance and foresight in relation to a geographic area. However, for the strategic trunk road network, it is slightly different. It is set up in the 1930s to connect every part of Scotland. It is the backbone of Scotland. It is the workhorse of moving goods and people about the country. It connects every ferry port or thereby. It is within five miles of all the major airports and connects all our cities. It is fundamentally important. We have understood over the past few years that the Huw and I are probably sat in the best part of 200-odd score calls. The second item on agenda is transport, and usually transport, into trunk roads. That is because the level of importance of an incident affecting our trunk road and affecting the goods and movements of vehicles across the trunk road. The Forth Road Bridge closure was a classic example of that. There needs to be a slight distinction between the oversight and management of the strategic network and that of the distributed network that supports the strategic network. You have just articulated the design criteria that this thinking around what a future model might be needs to do. How do you maintain or even strengthen the local accountability and the subsidiarity of decision making, while at the same time recognising that you have an asset of national strategic importance that must be managed as a critical asset for the whole country? How do you hold national level interests and local level interests to get the governance right for both of those and have smart procurement or contracting and decision making across the whole piece? That is exactly the challenge that the strategic action group needs to take on in thinking about what the right model is. That is great. Thank you. Gail Ross. Thanks, convener. Good morning. Liz Ditchburn, in your opening statement, you mentioned that going forward we might have to look at different options and make difficult choices. I wonder if you could expand on that. I think that it is the question that we were talking about in terms of the trajectory in the cycle. We are talking about long-term cycles here of major investment in new infrastructure alongside maintenance. At what point do you need to think about that dynamic? Roy flagged the nature of the, certainly thinking about the trunk road network in Scotland, the nature of some of that asset. Some of that is ageing now. If you have got a 40-year-old motorway, there is a point at which you have to face if there is now no longer just a patching opportunity and whether you need to go for a more significant investment in renewal. Those are the sorts of decisions that mean you might be looking at big numbers on maintenance and at what point. I think our job as officials and Transport Scotland in terms of the analysis that they do is to lay out what does that trajectory look like? What are the impacts of not increasing or attacking some of those specific challenges? It is really just that dynamic of how do you maintain the value of the asset that you currently have and continue to grow that asset by investment in developing it further. There is an important element there around the economic worth of new infrastructure. When we connect our cities up between Inverness and Perth and Aberdeen in Inverness, that will shorten the country. It will significantly reduce journey times. At the same time, we also have to look at the lifeline links of the 803, the supply chain to Islay and the whisky industry. It is absolutely fundamental that we make sure that that is maintained in the state that is fit for purpose to get that product out into the market in as short a time as possible. There is a balance to be had. We are currently coming out of that 10-year cycle, if you like, in relation to the infrastructure investment out of the recession. As we go forward with build A9 and the A96, we need to start to keep an eye on the remainder of the network that we have. We have a close watch and eye on in terms of structural condition. Thank you for that. I am glad that you mentioned the rest of the trunk network, because we have concentrated on motorways and other roads. In my constituency, we have had the meteoric and sudden rise of the NC500. Locals will tell you that it has been a road that has been there forever. It has had some intense marketing. As such, the amount of traffic on that road network has increased, I do not know by how much, but certainly by a lot. I realise that it is a lot of Highland Council roads. How do you think between yourselves and Bayer and Highland Council, you are going to be able to manage that and keep up that road condition? You are right. The NC500 has been a phenomenal success in terms of what it was set up to do. In fact, we were approached by the North Highland initiative when they were launching it. We have had a heads-up on that two or three years, and we have understood that. Subsequently, that success, as you said, has brought volumes of traffic. We monitor press every day, so we get to see how that is going down in a good sense and how it has caused some consternation among the communities in terms of volumes and speeding for what were quite quiet communities. We are a steering group for the North Coast 500 with the Highland Council, the North Highland initiative and the promoters of the North Coast 500, and ourselves and our operating company to talk about the emerging issues and about how best to address them. There is a steering group set up, Transport Scotland is part of that. Obviously, we will need to monitor and take action where it is appropriate to do so with our stakeholder partners. For me, that highlights two things, that example. One is that the world keeps changing. Even if we were to set out a blueprint now for everything that the Scottish Government ought to spend on maintenance for the next years, the real world intervenes, and we have to be able to have to flex and to adapt and to understand what these changing trends are, but I also think that example of just getting everybody together around a specific issue is a really good example of collaboration. Where we may not have seen the kind of collaboration yet that we all want to see on the overall picture, there are plenty of examples where people do get around the table and do really work together. I think that another important point to try and get across is that we understand not just our asset but the value of the asset to the Scottish economy. We have done a number of studies now on the impact of transport in the growth sectors. The study came back saying that it suggests that our transport networks contribute to £34 billion worth, 700,000 jobs, life sciences, creative industries, tourism and you can see that. As somebody arrives in Scotland at any of the airports and takes a hire car, they want to go and see the Highlands, or Edinburgh Castle, or some of the major sites. In B, they drive up to 82 and then head up to Inverness and then back down to 89. It is absolutely fundamental that we look after that part of the asset that is driving those growth sectors within the country. That is hugely important. North Cross 500 is a classic example of success, but we have to keep pace with that success, with the asset conditions as well. I hope that we are persuading them to come further north into Inverness as well. I want to go on to the cost of materials now. How has that affected the road maintenance budget? It is something that Audit Scotland referred to in the report, where it stated for road structural maintenance that the material cost was the biggest element of the cost in that operation. It probably comes as no surprise because the road structure remains as where you are resurfacing long lengths of road, so you are sourcing a lot of road surfacing materials and aggregates from quarries. That is a statement of fact, if you like, that it is the biggest cost. One thing that I would say from a Transport Scotland perspective in terms of looking at that and the cost of surfacing materials, we did a piece of research a number of years ago and developed a new UK-wide specification for road surfacing materials called TS-2010. We worked with industry on that to develop a new material that was more durable than existing road surfacing materials. What we were looking for in that specification was to get a longer lasting road surfacing material. In initial upfront cost, it might not necessarily be a cheaper material, but it is expected to last up to twice as long. We are now using that quite widely on the trunk road network. In the last couple of years, we have done something around 400 lane kilometres of resurfacing using the new material. That is expected into the future to make significant savings because it will be longer before we need to come back and do more maintenance. We are certainly very aware of the cost of materials. We are continually working with industry to do research and develop new materials. That is really good to hear. Does that apply to local authorities as well, or is that just Transport Scotland that we are using? There have been accusations levelled at local authorities in the past that it has been a bit of a false economy by going for the cheapest aggregates and that they have not been lasting very long at all. They have just had to go back in and do it again. The TS2010 is a national specification, so it is available to any road authority that wants to use it in their maintenance programmes. One thing that I would say about it, and it was Transport Scotland at the national agency that developed it for trunk roads, is probably more suited to higher speed roads. Local authorities have A-class roads and some dual-carriage roads that are high-speed roads, but they also have a lot of urban streets that are not. It is not the type of thing that you would use on an urban street, but you could use it on principal local authority A-class roads and dual-carriage roads. Just one final question. When a road has been resurfaced, particularly in Highland, it is not immediately white-lined. Is there a reason for that? It largely comes down to programming and remoteness. We encourage operating companies to package up their resurfacing works so that they can bring in a white-lining contractor from another part of Scotland to come and do white-lining and cover quite a lot of the network while they are rather than back and forth doing bits and pieces at a time. That is probably part of the reason why you are witnessing that. However, notwithstanding that, there is a specific requirement where they cannot leave it for more than 28 days so that they cannot leave it for many weeks or months before they come back and do white-lining. The other thing is that, in the interim, while they are waiting on white-lining contractors to come back and do the white-lining, they are required to put up signs that notify road users that there is a section of road that is not lined. There are specific response times where they have to do the white-lining in its 28 days. We encourage them to package their work so that they can get somebody in to do a meaningful piece of work while they are in that area. Is there a time limit for white-lining when the road has not been resurfaced but the lines have just faded and faded to an extent that they are barely there anymore? Operating companies are required to do annual detailed inspections for all assets andcillary assets, and white-lining is part of it. On a two-year rolling basis, we are operating companies that are required to assess the reflectivity of white-lines and where they fall below a certain level of reflectivity, those sections of road should be put into a programme of maintenance for re-lining. It is a rolling programme of looking at the reflectivity of white-lines and for those who fall below a certain level, putting that into a programme of maintenance to renew. I have missed it, but I cannot say anything in the report about the state of cat's eyes on Scotland's roads. Is it much the same kind of programme for the white-lining, as Gail describes? White-lining in cat's eyes tends to be the same contractor that will do that type of work. They are not subject to reflectivity. Cat's eyes are something that again would feed into programmes of work, but they can also be picked up as part of weekly safety inspections. Where there is a section of road that may be a single cat's eye missing is not necessarily a category 1 defect, but if you have a stretch of road that has several cat's eyes missing in a row, that effect will be a category 1 defect. What operating companies are required to do on trunk roads in those situations is to make a permanent repair within 28 days, so to go in and replace those cat's eyes. It is clear that, in some parts of the country, they are very good and they are clearly new. In some parts of the country, they do not work anymore. They need to be replaced. Monica Lennon, I will put on record that I am an elected member of South Lanarkshire Council. Good morning. Looking at page 36 of the Audit Scotland report, the report sets out that staff reductions are adding to the challenges for roads maintenance. It is something that Colin Mayer has set out in his written evidence. It is a pity that Colin is not here today. His ears will be burning. He has been mentioned quite a number of times. When we hear about some of the challenges that have been set out today, it is quite concerning that we have an ageing workforce. It looks like there are some steps being taken to address that, but in terms of the number of apprentices currently in training and graduates, it is a tiny number. It is a fraction of the 5,000 people who are engaged across local authorities. When we look at the scale of the challenges and we see that there have been lots of warnings that there are real workforce pressures, it is enough being done to address that. As an ex-local authority engineer, I started my career in Fife Regional Council. It is a very small community and we all came through much at the same time when there were large graduate intakes in local authorities. Those days are no longer, and I think that the professionals that are there are starting to head towards retirement, so they are street-line engineers, road safety engineers and professional engineers that look after the asset. That is part and parcel of the work that Colin has been looking at to see what can be done to address that. Jim Valentine and I explored some time ago the potential for sharing those resources among all the roads authorities or small groupings of roads authorities, and that may be one of the options that comes back to the table. For ourselves, we have recognised that as well. I struggled to secure chartered civil engineers within Transport Scotland, so we have started to try to grow our own. We have a very successful graduate training programme, but we are engaging with the next set of engineers that are coming forward. A large part of the work that has been done in Queensferry Crossing has been around the education of that infrastructure and the awareness of that in terms of STEM for school children coming forward. I do not have the exact figures to hand, but it is fairly substantial the amount of young school children that have come through that process and are now reinvigorated into looking at STEM as a possible career choice. Likewise with the A9, we have set up the A9 academy, which is again targeting towards both school children who are currently in the system, who may, by the time that they get through the system, be available to undertake work directly in their location on the A9 itself. A couple of positive steps that we recognise and that we need to start re-energising the work of engineering in Scotland. We have a long tradition of that. I think that the fourth road bridge work on social media highlighted the impact that engineers and all the other professionals involved in that particular incident can have on society, so that, again, there has been a great deal of profile-raising with the institution of the civil engineers to try and get that skill set back into the industry again. These are all professional engineers. They are the experts in this. I know that it is something that Roy looks a lot and is head of the engineering profession for the Scottish Government. I am the chief road engineer. I look after 100 professional technical engineers within Transport Scotland, so we are acutely aware of the skill shortage and they need to make sure that we grow the next generation of future leaders in civil engineering and asset renewal and infrastructure. In terms of road collaboration, we are talking about what we need to do to re-energise that. Roy has highlighted what we have done within Transport Scotland. I think that industry-wide we need to do more. That is one of the initiatives that has been taken forward by the RCP, so there will be more to come on that. Clearly, there is still work to be done. I appreciate that. I wonder where leadership lies. Responsibility cuts across many departments here, and it is for everyone. However, at a time when we know that there are fewer STEM teachers in schools with school curriculum and that there are different pressures, what is going to make this profession attractive when we see that, in terms of the local government spending roads budgets, they are obviously disproportionately affected because priorities lie elsewhere? Who really is promoting roads engineering and other sort of technical aspects as a future career? I think that it is absolutely, fundamentally, lies with us at the national agency, but also others that are involved with any type of infrastructure, whether it is schools, hospitals, prisons or whatever. We have got £6 billion worth of investment coming down the pipeline, the A9, the 96, and that is a considerable forward programme of work taken together with all the other schemes that are coming forward. I think that there is a really strong position now for schools who are going to get back interested in STEM and building the next generation of Scotland. However, it is not just about roads, it is railways, it is the ferries, and it is all the other infrastructure that goes around transport, and I think that it is incumbent on all of us that are involved in engineering to try and keep promoting that. Gilross. I just wondered what input you had into the Development and Young Workforce programme on that particular employment issue? Nothing directly from me, but I can take that away and look at that. I think that you touched on some of the exciting things that are happening in terms of infrastructure projects. We have talked a little bit today about collaborative working and perhaps where progress has been quite slow. I have been thinking about, again, some of the points that Collins made, but City Deal strikes me as a place, as a project, where they are already established and are emerging across the country, where collaborative working is obviously key. From my experience, perhaps Glasgow and Clyde Valley roads infrastructure and investment in roads is a big feature of City Deal, but given that we see that there is obviously declining workforce, people in local government are being asked to do more. Are you confident that people do have the right skills and the right place, and we are working collaboratively to ensure that those projects are going to be successful? Well, again, I cannot talk for local authority specifically, but from our perspective, Transport Scotland fully supports the direction of travel off the city deals. One of my colleagues, Alison Irvine, is probably well known to all the city deal organisations and takes an active role in ensuring that the national infrastructure needs and the local infrastructure needs are brought together as those schemes develop. For us, we are certainly geared up in terms of the resource that is required to service them. For local authorities, again, it would be one question for Colin or somebody else within the local authority environment. Because the city deals, city region deals sit within my responsibilities well from a Scottish government perspective, obviously local government is an extremely important partner within that. One of the exciting things about some of the city region thinking is exactly as you describe it, the place where all the different bits fit together, and because they are not just looking at cities, they are looking at city regions, I think connectivity and transport systems are absolutely the heart of saying, well, if you make these investments here, what else needs to happen to ensure that you get the benefits for that? And of course, that's not just about roads, it's often about other forms of transport as well, or about bus systems, for example. So I think there's so much that that does. And I think we're just seeing whether it's through the city region deals and the way in which local government is working together and then working with both Scottish government and of course UK government is involved in that too, or whether it's in the regional thinking in the context of the enterprise and skills review as well. So I think kind of regionality is just coming up in all sorts of different places and people are seeing those opportunities and starting to work together in very different ways. And of course, some areas have been doing that for a lot longer and a lot further ahead on that. But so I think it's a really exciting thing and it is one of the reasons why the enterprise and skills review highlighted further the regional thinking as one of the issues and of course the South of Scotland is one of the headlines of that review as well. So I think there's a big opportunity to work in very different ways and this roads issue is just one facet of that, but it's part of a bigger trend that we're seeing. Thank you. I'll just get one final question, which is slightly a different topic, but Colin Mayard, in his submission, he talked about the impact that utility companies can have on road assets and I think we'll all have experience of this locally where you see a new sort of road surface and in a few months later it's all being dug up again. And I know that there are systems in place to try and make sure that the companies coordinate with local authorities, but I wonder to what extent that is having an impact on the road assets and is there more potential for the utility companies to be making a financial contribution? Yes, so there's been work done recently by the work of the Scottish Roadworks Commissioner around this very point. There's an independent report done for the commissioner and that involved reaching out to utility companies and talking to stakeholders such as Rose Authorities. There's been a long-running debate not only in Scotland but in the United Kingdom about having utilities. Utilities need access. They've got statutory rights, anyway, as you would imagine, but they're a right to go in and dig up roads and then the standard of the reinstatement that's gone in there and obviously that has been a bonus contention for some people. One of the things that's been debated just now and it's out to consultation is the duration of the guarantee of the reinstatement, how long that should be and so we can provide details to the committee of what that consultation is. So there is a live debate around should it be longer than two years to guarantee the reinstatement of a utility company. It'd been interesting to see that. We can supply you details with that to the committee. Thank you. Alex Neil. I'm just going back to exploring the role and performance of local authorities in road maintenance. Colin Mayer, in his submission, points out that local authorities on average across Scotland spend one-tenth per kilometre of money on roads that Transport Scotland spends on the trunk road network. He clearly implies that if you look at the pattern over a longer period of time of local authorities spending on roads that basically the reduction in the road budget is being used basically to fund the increase in social care. Now obviously I would disagree with the need for an increase in social care funding but nevertheless there's a clear trend there and if you look at the Auditor General's report between 2011-12 and 2014-15 there was a 14% reduction in local authorities spending on roads. So two questions. Number one, can this continue? Are we not going to reach a crisis point? Are they not cutting their nose despite their face? Secondly, there's the issue of the efficiency of the local authority operations. Now I live in Ayr and the Ayrshire roads alliance has been a total disaster. I think probably Roy knows about and no doubt Mr Gellys knows about the famous, the now infamous I think, Homsdon road development in Ayr where the cycle track made the road ten times more dangerous than it was and then through public opinion were forced to lift it and nobody could discipline there anything for it. It cost well over £100,000. It was not a good advert for any kind of service, let alone a shared service and more and more and given also the point that convener was making about the very very slow progress in getting shared service type arrangements amongst local authorities in Scotland. Is it not time to actually question whether local authorities really are the right bodies to be delivering this kind of service? Well, maybe we go back to your first question. It's notwithstanding the politics administrations at what level does what and this applies to roads nationally, regionally and locally. Can we continue the way we are going as a country? No, we cannot. I think the auditor general just highlighted there the funding and I think hopefully we'll set out to you today and the evidence to the committee today and the findings in the Audit Scotland report that Scotland roads needs investment and we're talking about the existing infrastructure as well as all the arguments that have been presented today for investing in new schemes. Can it carry on as it is without something significant happening down the line? No. As I said earlier, in terms of local authorities, we carefully say clearly that we don't represent local authorities as we said earlier. As I said, the model for delivery of roads going forward is part of a mature debate we need to have and that should be what's the future for local authorities and what's the future for the administration of the strategic roads and we're up for that. There's no question about that but I'll probably leave it there. Very diplomatic. It's quite difficult for us as we appreciate it. It's probably easier if Colin was here. To put some context on it, the trunk road network, it's 6 per cent of the total road network in Scotland, so about 55,000 kilometres, three and a half is ours. It carries a third of all traffic, two thirds of all all HGV traffic, so it's moving the bulk of the goods and the products that are generated in Scotland across the country. Having said that, that has to come from somewhere, so the distribution centres are by and large on local authority networks. Their A-class road network is about 13 per cent and then the BC and unclassified is the remainder, 80 per cent. So there's a large proportion of the network which is very socially valued but probably isn't doing the same amount of economic generation as some of that higher class A-class road. Perhaps that's the discussion that we have to have about the balance between the network itself and what it actually does to generate social and inclusive economic growth. Can I ask the Enroy to supplement to that? Is there disaggregation of the local authority spend between the different classifications of roads so that we can compare their spend per kilometre of CNA-class roads compared to yours? Donald? We could do that but we need to be careful about that because, as Roy pointed out, the traffic flows on trunk roads are significantly greater and obviously the percentage of HGVs is significantly greater. The roads are serving different purposes. They have different levels of service. The trunk road network, the specification in the trunk road contracts is a much higher level of service in some areas than it is on local roads. Local roads, as was pointed out, there is a hierarchy there from A right down to unclassified roads. Again, there's quite a wide variance in traffic flows and level of service that's provided. You could do comparisons how much spend there is per kilometre but it's maybe not really a meaningful comparison because levels of service are quite different. So how do we measure the performance of local authorities then? Sorry, benchmark? How should we measure the performance of local authorities? I mean, I'm coming on to the comparison, the benchmarking between your performance and the international comparisons and the rest of the UK, which is a good way of looking at where we're at, but how should we measure the performance of local authorities? What's the best way to measure whether they're doing a good job or not? Transport Scotland hasn't done that and it wouldn't be a role to do that but obviously Audit Scotland have looked at the performance of local authorities through their audit and obviously they've picked up on a few things. Some positive, not so positive and the less positive, was around the collaboration and sharing that we were talking about and the pace, but the one thing that they do highlight is that the condition of local roads, notwithstanding the reductions in budgets and the pressures on workforce and all the rest of it, is that their road condition is reported as being relatively stable over the piece. So I suppose that local authorities would quite rightly look upon that as a positive, that notwithstanding the pressure they're under, they've managed to maintain the condition of the roads at a fairly stable level, although there is potential with under investment that at some point that falls off a cliff at some point if you don't do something about it. So there's a positive there in terms of their road condition and the other thing that Audit Scotland highlighted about local authorities is that they all now have published road asset management plans and I suspect that's what's helping them maintain their roads in a stable condition. So where we're at at the moment, the measure of performance of local authorities is on their road condition and have they implemented road asset management plans and there's positives there, but the sharing and collaboration element which might unlock efficiencies, that's where the performance is not so good. That's certainly my take on the Audit Scotland report. Is there any evidence to the best of your knowledge that the few areas that do have shared services, such as the Ysher one, but there are others, that they are better performers or more efficient than the areas that don't have such arrangements? I think that there's limited evidence that we have of that and it depends who you speak to. To be fair, I think that there's an exhibit in the Audit Scotland report, which I think is significant, and it's worth referencing the graph that shows the performance. If you look at exhibit 9, you could maybe draw a few pages on it. The two councils that are in the Ysher Rosa lines are South Ysher and East Ysher, and you'll see that South Ysher are spending less in East Ysher spending more. Obviously, the point that I think we've been making across the piece is that obviously administrations make a decision about what they feel they want to spend their money on. Although they share a service, one council has made a decision to take one tack with the money that they've got and one has taken another decision. I'm looking more in terms of the work that they do. Is there any evidence in terms of efficiencies? For example, if you're running a shared services organisation, do you get benefits in terms of procurement? You're presumably buying more materials, for example. Do you get benefits in terms of economies of scale because you're covering a much bigger mileage of road? What I'm trying to get at is, is there evidence that shared services actually lead to cost savings improvement and efficiency overall better performance? There's certainly evidence where shared procurement can bring efficiencies. It's something that we've looked at in Transport Scotland. We have entered into shared procurements with the Welsh Government on undertaking road condition surveys. We have a contract that runs for a period of six or seven years, but annually through that contract we're measuring the condition of trunk roads both in Scotland and in Wales. We used to do it separately. We had our own contracts for that and we paid a certain rate per kilometre for those road condition surveys to be done. However, we found that we were actually both using the same contractor. When our contracts came to an end, we decided to run a joint procurement to get the economies of scale. We're almost doubling the length of trunk road network to be measured in the one contract. That reduced our cost of road condition surveys by a third by getting that economy of scale. Certainly, there are benefits through shared procurement. You will, obviously, the more you buy in bulk, the cheaper the rate, effectively. To be fair, there is some evidence in the Scotland report that there are some councils improving their performance while others are pretty stagnant. I've just found a bit in Colin's response on page four. I think he recognises exactly what you're saying. In relation to question four, current benchmarking data does not as yet show the lower cost of better outcomes in shared road services, but they do create a framework for resilience and economies of scale and scale, given forward budget pressures. I think an obvious thing that this committee presumably would look at is what more could be done to demonstrate and to allow us to monitor more closely the comparative efficiencies of the 32 local authorities and yourselves, obviously. Can I just finally come to the international comparisons between Transport Scotland and the rest of the UK, but other countries as well? And can I say right away, obviously, I recognise the very substantial part of your budget now that's invested in new road building, because I've signed all the major ones off myself when I was infrastructure secretary. And we'll take credit for them, by the way, including the Geoligordd A9 and the A96, and the M73, M74 corridor. I just want to make sure that's on the record, by the way. Can I have a question, please? But clearly, we're a wee bit behind our colleagues in the rest of the UK and indeed internationally, so I presume you have a strategy, a programme, a plan to get nearer to at least the European average. Yeah, I'll let Donald come in on this, but as we started to look at this a few years back, I was very keen to try and identify, A, did we have the right standard, first and foremost, in Scotland for the trunk road network, and B, how did we compare? So we did a piece of work with our consultants to first understand whether you can compare like for like, and it is quite difficult, because every road's authority takes a slightly different approach to monitoring condition, but we found a mechanism that allowed us to get very close to a kind of a league table, if you like, of where we are. I have to say that France, Italy and Ireland are worse than us, but we are where we are in the table. But what we did identify was that the standards that we should be aiming for, the top position that we should be aiming for for our trunk road network is 3 per cent of motorways for interventions, 6 per cent for dual carriageways and 8 per cent for single carriageways, and we are currently sitting at 6, 8 and 10 for those categories. So we've certainly got a vision of where we want to be, and England, they are sitting about 3 per cent for their asset. I think that Donald correct me if I'm wrong, it was Canada and New Zealand for 6 and 8 per cent for single carriageways and dual carriageways respectively, but I'll hand over to Donald. You know Roy's kind of touched on most of it there, particularly around the difficulty in benchmarking. There are some health warnings that come with that, and where it all came from really was we were acutely aware of all the new infrastructure that was planned, the kind of stuff that you were taking credit for there. We were acutely aware that all that was coming through the pipeline, and what does that mean for the rest of the network that doesn't have major interventions planned, we're going to end up with a stark contrast, if you like. So what we were tasked with doing was looking at a long-term strategy of aiming for a target that would bring the rest of the network up to a certain target, but the question was, well, what is that target in terms of road conditions? What target should we be aiming for? So the task was to look internationally and see if anybody else had targets that we could compare with. So we did that and we did report on that, and that's in that kind of league table that you mentioned, but one thing I would say is that that comparison we couldn't directly compare with other countries, and really what it came down to was to other countries, they have a threshold where they look to do maintenance on a road, so it's where you intervene to undertake maintenance, what's the percentage? We all have the same target to do maintenance at a certain threshold, but the thresholds are different, so that's where it becomes difficult. Essentially, our main comparison was with, as Roy pointed out, the trunk roads in England, so we then did—we've got the ability to do various financial scenarios that can get us to a particular target over a defined period of years, so that's where the 3 per cent, the 6 per cent and the 8 per cent target came from for roads in need of maintenance for motorways, jewels and singles, respectively, and we have produced financial targets, which over a 20-year period, because it's at the end of a 20-year period that all the new infrastructure will be—the current new planned infrastructure will be delivered. So there's a financial plan, which is a vision, if you like, for what we can do with the rest of the network to get it up to that 3 per cent or 4 per cent that's mentioned in the Audit Scotland report for England. So that vision sits there, but that's looking way into the future and availability of funding, while that will have to go through the Government sausage machine at the appropriate time, but the vision is there and that comes back to the choices that Liz was mentioning earlier, that there's choices to be made about whether we commit to delivering on that. I'm interested in road safety, although the condition is one element. Presenting a safe network is equally as important. We sit 7th out of 42 countries at the minute, so Norway, Maltaw, Sweden and England are above us, and then you take GB and UK. We've got a very good strong track record of safely maintaining, managing and operating our network with the funds that we have, and we've got the lowest road safety casualty figures on record, so I think that's something to be proud of. Can I take credit for that as well then? Thank you for letting me back in. When Alex Neil was talking about performance, I was quite intrigued by a point again that Colin Mayer had made in his submission that, in relation to local roads, the use of a single national corporate indicator, the road condition index for roads does not tell the whole story and it tells us that previously we looked at street lighting and bridges as part of that information and then that was stripped out, but it looks like it's going to be put back in. I just wonder if you could briefly say who made that decision and why. Again, who's making this change and why? What do we hope to get from this? It probably comes down to the Audit Scotland audit and in terms of the scope and the brief for that, in speaking to local authorities, in planning that audit, local authorities had good information on roads in terms of an indicator that they could provide that was auditable, but probably overall 32 authorities, they possibly didn't have the same level of information that they could do a comparison on condition for structures and lighting. However, I know through their new asset management plans that there are models in place that enable them to better compare condition for structures and lighting, which possibly relates back to changes in the whole of Government accounts, where authorities now are required to report asset value in their accounts for their roads. To be able to do that, you need to have good information on all your assets, not just the road carriage itself but bridges and lighting. I suspect that it was down to what was available for the Audit Scotland review, rather than any particular decision about whether that information is in or out. It was what was available to be considered as part of the audit. Thank you. A number of questions are arising from the questions that have come earlier. First of all, just on Mr Neil's point now, how much would it cost, would your projections show, as the actual cost required to get the Scottish trunk road network up to the same standard as the English road network? We have looked at the structural maintenance budget, which is the particular part of the budget that influences the road condition index. Current budgets for structural road maintenance are around £40 million per annum to do structural maintenance. Audit Scotland highlighted from the information that it asked us to maintain current condition, which we should be spending about £62 million. In terms of a vision going into the future, over 20 years to get to the level of our target, the 3 per cent, it would be an annual budget of £79 million. That is from our financial planning, and that would be over a 20-year horizon. So £79 million per year for 20 years is what's required to get down. But the footprint of the network continues to increase significantly, thanks to Mr Neil. With increased footprint comes increased maintenance, which requires increased funding, but what we know is that funding is not increasing for the trunk roads. What do your projections show as the impact of that? That, I would expect, would have a positive benefit, because if you take the central Scotland motorway improvements at the moment, the M8, M73 and M74, that will introduce fairly lengthy new sections of motorway on our network, and that will replace old life-expired infrastructure. The old life-expired stuff comes out of the equation and you're replacing it with something new, which you won't really have to do too much maintenance on for quite some time. You'll obviously have to cut the grass and empty the gullys and all that sort of thing, but you won't have to fill potholes or resurface length of roads, so the new stuff will actually have a positive benefit on that financial plan. Firstly, you said that the budgets aren't increasing for trunk roads. The draft 17-18 budget does propose an increase, so I think, as I said at the beginning, the draft 17-18 budget proposes an increase in the total on management maintenance and operation of the trunk road network proposes an increase from 305 million, which was increased in year, so that baseline increased in year because of the 15 million extra that was allocated, so the proposal is that it moves from 305 to 368, so that is the proposal within the draft budget is that it increases. I think the other thing I would say is to, we need to remember what the kind of financial models from which we can derive numbers like 62 million per year, and the reality of that down to actual in-year and multi-year budgeting. Those give us an idea of, they kind of take some assumptions and they give us an idea of the sorts of levels of investment that will be required over a quite long period of time. Obviously, you then have choices about the phasing of that, about front-loading and back-loading, you have choices about how you target and spend that money, so there's a lot, there's a tremendous amount below the level of that. I think that, you know, it's just important to make that distinction between a financial model, which gives some interesting information, and which we obviously were keen is available for all decision makers and is indeed made public through the publication of the road asset management plan, and then how that is then turned into in-year, multi-year and budgeting process. It doesn't tell you the budget answer, it tells you something about the nature of the level of investment required. Thank you. Just going back to another point, but coming off the trunk roads and going into the local, in Mr Mayor's paper, he talks about prioritisation. One of the constraints on councils is that they have to prioritise certain aspects of their provision. Do you think, bluntly, that it's time, given the importance to the economy that you've talked about throughout and safety, which we'll come back to, is it time that the councils had to prioritise the road network? I think that these are decisions for councils to take and for the number of councillors on this committee. The current set-up is very much that those are decisions for local governments to take in accordance with their local needs and on the basis of the seniority of decision making. Do I think it's time that we set something different? That's a policy, that will be a policy change and that's not where we are currently. A couple of quick points, Mr Brannan mentioned safety, quite rightly, and you mentioned, Ms Ditchburn, about the cutting the grass and filling the gullies and things. The Audit Scotland report says that road conditions are a key factor in safety for motorists, for cyclists, for pedestrians. Is it reasonable to assume that the risks to safety increase if the road condition declines? Are there any studies being done into that? Yes, if the road condition declines beyond what it's designed to do, skid resistance, you would expect the risk of an accident to increase. If I may expand on that, in 2010, the Scottish Government launched its strategic vision for reducing casualty figures in Scotland to a target of 2020. It was the first administration in the United Kingdom to do that. Obviously, road safety involves education, enforcement and encouragement, as well as engineering. From our part as a statutory transport authority, we obviously take a steer on the engineering aspect directly on our roads. Sitting below that, we have a strategic road safety plan, which we refreshed last year. It is citizen good stead. Now, as part of that refresh, again, we look across for international best practice. What we do on anio basis is look at the strategic transport network and look at its performance in terms of accidents. With the resources that we have this year, we have just over £8 million, we target specifically where there are no accident problems and what might mean by that is killed and seriously injured. It is important that we target those areas as opposed to where there might be a perceived or public perception of safety. We target that specifically with known successful interventions such as skid resistance or improving signage and lining, improving drainage. It could be quite technologically high, for example, the probably most high-profile example of an intervention through that team is average speed cameras on A9, or, as I said, it could be fairly low-tech stuff such as improving signing and lining on a route action plan. Can I just say something about the link between road condition and safety? That is where maintenance policy comes into play. Obviously, in terms of funding, where you might want to do major maintenance work when your road condition indicator tells you that you should be doing major maintenance work, but for whatever reason you have to delay it, that does not necessarily mean that your condition indicator might go down, but that does not mean that section of road is unsafe, because our maintenance regime then is to continue to monitor it and do patching repairs as and when required. That is a perfectly legitimate maintenance policy. All roads authorities nationally and internationally do that, so it is through that policy that we are always targeting safety as the primary concern. Just if you would not mind completing a picture on that, the report shows that the biggest cause of road accidents appears to be driver error and reaction. Are you able to fill in the other side of the road maintenance piece as to what is being done to address the driver error aspect? Is that something that falls with you? There is a strategic group that oversees the delivery of the Government strategy of the 2020 targets. That is chaired by the Minister for Transport and Islands, and it meets three times a year to go through. There are a number of action plans online, and that covers, as I say, education, enforcement and engineering encouragement. The ethos is that road safety is everybody's responsibility, from the designers of roads to businesses that use roads, pedestrians and so on. We are constantly looking at that, and that itself was looked at last year because, obviously, 2015 represented the midpoint to where we are on the journey towards achieving those targets. We are on track against those targets, but obviously we have to keep a close eye on that if we are going to land them by 2020. That was refreshed last year, and as part of that, we refreshed our road safety plan. I would like to ask a couple of questions around the performance concerns around Bayer Scotland. I assume that I am directing most of those questions at Hugh Gillis, who is responsible for trunk roads. Is that correct? I can defer to my colleague Donald to oversaw the investigation. I would first like to ask about the significant failings. Mr Mordden, if you oversaw the investigation, I believe that the group called Pag Plus did the investigation into some of the allegations around Bayer Scotland, and you found that there were significant failings around the performance under that contract, which included work that was being done and correctly documented and inaccurately recorded by Bayer Scotland. Bayer was charging for work that was not undertaken and, to a lesser extent, not charging for work that it did undertake, and the controls that Bayer Scotland should have to deliver the contracts were either not in place or were not properly enforced by it. Can you tell me if that raised concerns within Transport Scotland when you came up with those significant failings and what was done to address them? It absolutely did raise concerns. Obviously, the first thing that I would say is that, as the report identified, Transport Scotland was overcharged by £280,000. That is obviously unacceptable, and that money was recovered from Bayer Scotland. Having said that, and that obviously came out of the third investigation that you mentioned there and the failings that were identified, so I could maybe just say a wee bit more about specifically what those failings were and then come on to the improvement aspects of that. As you probably noticed, most of it—pretty much all of it—was around routine carriageway patching. What Bayer Scotland did in undertaking that operation was that it identified all the patching that was required on the network, as we might have expected and identified the defects, and they planned their programme of patching to take care of that. In doing so, Pag identified that there was no evidence that what they had identified needed done was not justified. Patches were required. What Bayer Scotland then did was, as is normal practice, they designed the patching work that was required. With patching being a routine operation, the difficulty is that, until you go on site and start digging up the defective piece of road, you do not actually know how deep you are going to have to go until you find good material. In designing that work and estimating the cost of it, you have to make assumptions and there is effectively what you might call a default design for a patch, which you will certainly know the area, but you do not necessarily know the depth. The default for a patch is 100 millimetres or four inches, typically as the depth of a patch. That goes to the operations team to undertake the work. They order the material and go and do the work. What was found was that there was evidence that they had gone on site and they had done the patches and excavated out the relevant amount of material, so they did what was justified. In some cases, that was deeper than 100 millimetres and in some cases, that was less than 100 millimetres in depth. When an operating company does an operation like that, what they are supposed to do is, at the end of the process, they amend the operation's instruction with the correct depth. But what Bayer Scotland was doing, they were not doing that. They were effectively, this is where the failings in the management process were, the design depth fed through to the final depth and that was what was charged. In some cases, what that meant was, and this was established by PAG going in and doing a coring exercise on a representative sample, some patches were deeper than 100 millimetres and some were less, so there was a mixture of overcharging and undercharging. The net position was an overcharge of £280,000, so an improvement plan was obviously required on the back of that. I should say that the error rate that PAG found was something of the order 6.6 per cent on the 30 sites that they visited. In terms of evaluating the £280,000, that was extrapolated over all the patching operations that they had done since the start of the contract. That is where the £280,000 came from. On the back of that, we obviously took that up with Bayer Scotland and invited them to respond to that and put in place a rigorous process to ensure that it would not happen again. In doing so, they have put together a 13-point action plan, which has well progressed at the moment. We are asking PAG to monitor and audit that improvement plan. The £280,000 is a significant amount of taxpayer's money that has been paid to a contractor for work that has been overcharged. Are you confident that that total just reached £280,000 and that there was not more? The allegations originated in Bayer's North East unit. We started there and did a thorough investigation, but Bayer obviously had a contract in the north-west, so we did the same exercise in the north-west. We did a coring operation, and the £280,000 is a combination of the error rate across both units. At the same time, we also looked at the units in the south of Scotland, the south-east and the south-west, to see if there was a similar pattern there—different operating companies. However, those coring investigations gave the south units a clean bill of health. There were no findings of overcharging or undercharging in the south. That was my next question. There are four or five trunk road operators that are not operational in Scotland, so you checked the others, and it was just Bayer Scotland that were overcharging the Scottish Government. Has the contract come up for renewal since? That is quite concerning. If the other trunk road operators can get that right, obviously there is a way for the teams on the ground to know how to do this and to get it right. It seems strange that Bayer Scotland would be the only one to get it wrong. Has the contract come up for renewal since? The contract has come up for renewal and the contracts in the north-west and south-west. The north-east contract, which was subject to the allegations that has not come up for renewal, has another two years to run before we would consider extensions. However, the contract in the north-west for Bayer and the south-west for Transerv came up not for renewal, but for consideration of extensions. We thoroughly explored that with operating companies that were interested in whether they would want to pursue extensions by providing a business case, and we went through a rigorous process with both Bayer in the north-west and the south-west, and extended both of those contracts. Bayer's contracts have been extended despite the fact that they overcharge the Government £280,000, and despite the fact that you have other contractors that do not overcharge the Scottish Government. We had to take in a much wider view. Sorry to interrupt, but did those other contractors bid for the contract that was up for renewal? No, it was not put up for renewal and put out to tender. There is a contractual provision that enables extension of all five of the trunk road operating company contracts. There is a requirement on us to consider whether we wish to extend those contracts at points in time. We took into account a wide range of factors in coming to that conclusion. Bayer decided to extend it. Is that wise for the Scottish Government to extend a contract to a company that has a proven record of overcharging the Scottish taxpayer by hundreds of thousands of pounds? Obviously, it would have been a different outcome if the outcome of the investigation had uncovered a deliberate act of overcharging. What obviously uncovered was a process failure. The trunk road operating companies are— Sorry, there are four other trunk road operators in Scotland with a proven track record of not overcharging the taxpayer. There are three that we employ a total across the five units, yes. Would they not be able to take on—would Scottish taxpayers not have more confidence if one of those companies who did not overcharge them were to take that contract forward? If we had chosen not to extend the contract and put it out to tender—in other words, if we had not extended the Bayer north-west contract, we would have gone through a tender exercise and put it out on to the open market and give those other companies the opportunity to bid for that contract. Of course, in doing so, Bayer would have been entitled to bid for that contract as well and could have gone through a successful tender process and won that contract. The other aspect is that, regardless of whether we extended the contract in the north-west, it will be working for us in the north-east anyway for another few years. You're saying that there's a really important set of issues here, and Hugh, you should say some more as well perhaps, which is around the way in which we need to assess our contractors, which will be a range of factors. There's a lot of money at stake in all of these contracts and there's performance issues and everything. Clearly, the process failing that was found was completely unacceptable, but things do happen. I think what the team has done is on the back of really forensic, comprehensive investigation has held a very, very high bar to say, Bayer, you messed up here, you need to absolutely prove to us that you are worthy of maintaining this contract and you need to show us how you're going to improve, how you're going to ensure it never happens again, and we want to see you really going—not just doing what you think the minimum might be, we want to see you going beyond that. The team should say more about it, but the response that's been seen from Bayer, I think there is confidence in that response and it has gone beyond just fixing the immediate to saying, actually how can they continue to strengthen and improve their own systems more broadly? If I can make a point to respond to that, I take your point, mistakes are made, but the other three operating contractors did not make the same mistakes, they have not tried to rip off the Scottish taxpayer, which is what Bayer has done by £280,000. Now, if you have a track record as a Scottish Government of employing another three companies that can do the job that you ask them to do, at good value to the taxpayer, why on earth would the Scottish Government choose to extend a contract of a company who has overcharged the taxpayer? I think it's really important to clarify again, and as Donald said, they did not try to rip off the Scottish Government. If we had found, if the evidence, if the investigation had found evidence of criminality, evidence of fraud, evidence of systematic willful overcharging, then that would have been a completely different case. I think it's really important that this is understood in these terms. It's an important and significant process failing, but it's a process failing that resulted in some undercharging and some overcharging, and that's absolutely unacceptable. Is it not up to you as director general of the economy, the Scottish Government, to make sure that you're hiring contractors that don't have process failings and that there are other options open to you? So why extend a contract of a contractor who can't do that? Because the contractor was able to demonstrate and the team should say more about it, the contractor was able to demonstrate that they accepted that, they completely accepted it, they accepted that that was a failing, they have put in place significant mitigation to both address that, they've reimbursed us, and they've put in place action to address that risk going forward, but I think that Roy... If I could just set some context in terms of the contracts and the approach that we've got. Our contracts are publicly available, so anybody can go in and see the contracts and the requirements of any of our operating companies in each of the geographic areas, and when you go in there you'll see the level of detail that's required to comply with both undertaking work and bidding for work. We have a number of different mechanisms of monitoring our contracts, one of them through our own staff within Transport Scotland, and they monitor probably around about 54 different indicators in the contract. We have payment adjustment factors, which allow us to withhold payment from our contractors if the incorrect level of documentation has not been forthcoming in the monthly statements. Separate to the internal review of our contracts, we also have the performance audit group, CH2M, AECOM and TRL. We've appointed them on a third term, seven years, they are independent, and they monitor the operating companies over a whole range of different key performance indicators. Some of those indicators, in the Pag report you'll see that, some of those indicators indicate process failures across all the units, but the rigorous standards that we apply to the contracts to ensure that we get the highest level of service has been recognised elsewhere. Western Australia took our model and have called it performance evaluation group, but something very similar to our approach, so the uniqueness that we've got is that we've got a both an internal audit approach on it but also an external audit approach on it. The independent report that Pag does is independent, so they write it, we check it for factual accuracy but it's published on their website and it indicates performance across a range of different measures, from management service, quality service, financial management and delivery of service. Mr Brown, I understand that the Scottish Government transport Scotland has all its processes. I just don't think that the Scottish taxpayer would understand why the Scottish Government would choose to renew a contract of a contractor who has overcharged the Scottish Government when there are other contractors in Scotland working for the Scottish Government who don't do that, but let me move to my next question and it's a bit around governance of this contract because there was someone in Transport Scotland when the complaints were made, the performance concerns about Bear Scotland by constituents of mine, they were made directly to Transport Scotland for investigation. Those concerns were immediately forwarded by email to the company Bear Scotland. The email that I have here is dated 21 May 2015. It's from a man called Jonathan Moran. Was he in your team? It's salutated gents, which I think is a very cosy salutation between Transport Scotland and a Government contractor, but perhaps that's just civil service speak. Then it goes on to outlay to detail the concerns that were made. Can you tell me, in terms of governance between Transport Scotland and a contractor that the Scottish Government is paying, is it appropriate if concerns are raised just to immediately forward them on to the contractor for their information, or would it not be more appropriate to carry out an internal investigation first? I'm not familiar with the email that you've got there. I can send it to you after. I could probably get it at our end anyway. What I would say is that the Transport Scotland network maintenance teams, which Jonathan is part of, are the ones that are managing the contracts on a day-to-day basis. They do deal with the public regularly and get many complaints—well, not many complaints, but when they get complaints coming from members of the public, they will then make inquiries with the operating company to verify if there's any substance to those and get a response from the operating company. In other words, what are you doing about this? In that particular case, if he had complaints put to him by a member of the public in the first course of action, he would have been watching your view on that. I accept that the difference in this situation is that those were allegations of fraud, so I would suggest that, in that particular case, a different approach could have been taken. In terms of the salutation, I wouldn't read anything into that. Obviously, we have professional working relationships with the operating company staff, and they are good professional working relationships. We are dealing with those people on a day-to-day basis, and we meet them regularly in meetings, so to address them as giants might not. I wouldn't read anything into that. It doesn't suggest anything in terms of our rigor, if you like, in how we manage the contracts. I will ask Donald Morrison a further question. You are saying that, in terms of governance of a contract, it is appropriate for those concerns to be immediately forwarded to the contractor for their opinion on them before an internal investigation is conducted. In terms of public complaints, yes, it would be. The difference in this case that I acknowledge is that those were allegations of fraud, and that puts a different perspective on the type of complaint. Generally, complaints that we receive are directed to the operating company, because they are the best place to deal with complaints. In fact, there is a national helpline for road users to make complaints to the operating company staff. No, I will continue my line of question with Mr Morrison, but when this was followed up and when Mr Jonathan Mayer was challenged on this, he then said that he had sent the email erroneously to Bear Scotland. I can reassure you of my impartiality and my mistake was a genuine oversight for which I again apologise. He means sending the email to Bear Scotland. What is the Transport Scotland process around complaints or concerns being raised around a contractor? Is it to refer it immediately to the contractor, or is it, as Jonathan Mayer seems to refer to in his subsequent email, that that was a mistake and he should not have done that? What is it? For public complaints, we would forward them to the operating company to deal with. In this case, I would like to say— Why is he apologised for the email? Because those were allegations of fraud. Can I say? I think you are raising extremely important points. This is not a detail that we have discussed as a team. I think the information that you are providing to us now is worthy of investigation. We will take this away and we will properly look at what the process was that we undertook and whether we handled that information appropriately. You are absolutely right that in any sensible whistleblowing policy there will be very clear guidance around confidentiality of that material and protection of whistleblowers. If we have failed, and I do not know whether we have or not, but if we have failed to do that appropriately, we will take action. However, what I would like to do is get the information and take it away from investigation. I think that I have one thing to add to that. I think that, if Donald can you can say a bit more about when you took over the actual investigation and the fact that there was a shroud of secrecy around exactly what you undertook and involved the police in that? Absolutely. When the investigation itself was instigated, that was undertaken by Pag, as we said. That was done independently of Transport Scotland. Transport Scotland had no role to play in the investigation itself that Pag undertook. Pag completed the investigation and obviously reported back to us with their report. Our only involvement during the process was to get updates from them on their progress and where they were at with coding and all that kind of stuff. So Pag were left to get on and undertake a rigorous investigation and produce the report. When that was complete, we then shared that with Police Scotland because the allegations had originally gone to Police Scotland as well. When they had received the allegations, they contacted us to ask if we were doing anything about it and we said that we had instigated a full independent investigation. We were content with that but we just wanted to know what the outcome was. We shared the report with them at the end. We sat down with them and had quite a detailed meeting to go through the report. The detectives that we spoke to were quite content that we had done a thorough investigation. They were content with the scope and extent of that investigation and the outcome of it. We were satisfied that there was no evidence of any criminal activity. The final piece in that jigsaw was that, before they could sign it off and say they weren't going to take it any further, they wanted their chief inspector to have a look at it and then they would confirm whether they intended to undertake any further investigation, which they duly did. Yes. The police told me that they had seen the failings and the overcharging but it hadn't gone as far as criminal activity. In my letter from DCI Andrew Patrick, who undertook the police investigation, which is now closed, it is fine for the committee to discuss this. The final issue that I want to ask about is the contractual arrangements around scrap and waste management. It is my understanding and the police's understanding as well when they looked at the contract that waste materials, whether they are lampposts that have been brought down or road signs that have been brought down, has written into the contract that waste is then taken to the scrap merchant and that cash or check is then given to the contractor. This is outlined in the police's letter. It says that this waste contract has been obtained and shows that where Bear Scotland recovers any items during site clearance, ownership of that property becomes Bear Scotland's. The subsequent disposal of the property is at the discretion of Bear Scotland and they are entitled to the credit value. Is it appropriate for Government contractors to profit from crown property and for that to be written into their contracts? It is not written in as a requirement or an avenue for them to make profit. For all the operations that they do, they provide us with rates and prices. The police told me that the disposal of waste and the receipts from that waste to go to the contractor was a contractual, was in the contract. It is in the contract? Yes. Sorry, I thought you just said that it was not. No, it is sorry. Any waste arising from the operations is the responsibility of the contractor to dispose of and if they get any credit for that, they win the benefit, if you like. These are contracts that are in terms of the operations provided with rates and prices and in pricing the contract, in order to win the contract they are putting in competitive bids and, in order to do that, they will make an estimate of anything that they can win through the operations that they might gain and they will take account of that in their pricing. While they get the benefit of the value of any scrap, the receipt of that will be included in their pricing of the contract. In other words, in order to win the contract they can lower their prices because they can anticipate that they might get some value back in the value of scrap. That is fairly normal for all term maintenance contracts. Scottish ministers, indeed Transport Scotland, have no facility to process scrap or to store anything of that nature in order to do that. No, I do not suggest that they do it. Sorry, if I can finish, I do not suggest that they do it. It just surprises me that the receipts would go to the company. Are you saying that it is written into all of the trunk road contractor's contracts that waste? It is written into all of those contracts and, indeed, I suspect that it is common practice for all types of contracts throughout the UK and beyond, I would suspect. I can just continue my line of questioning. Are you confident that waste is always proper waste and is not pulled down perhaps a bit before time? If the contractors are actually getting the receipts for this, it seems quite an interesting arrangement. To undertake operations, it would need to be part of a planned programme of maintenance that has been approved by Transport Scotland. Taking down assets that are do not require to be taken down, if that was happening through the rigor of the processes that we have in place, we would have picked that up. There is no evidence from any audit or investigation, and we are continually auditing these operating companies on the justification of their maintenance programmes. There has been no evidence to suggest that there is anything like that going on, but it is perfectly legitimate for them to process waste and receive the benefit of that. Roy Brann, you wanted to add something? Just to set that in contact with the contractual conditions, on the Queensferry crossing, the temporary steel that is used to support the deck at the minute is the contractor's, and it is for him to do what he pleases with it. That steel is scrap. Once it comes down, it will be disposed off by the contractor. Most contracts across the country—civil engineer contractors—allow for the product of waste or whatever it may be is the responsibility of the contractor. The substantial amount of steel on Queensferry crossing in terms of scrap is obviously an element that would have been priced in there by the contractors taking that scheme forward, given the nature of the temporary works. Colin Beattie. Just to say that members of the committee have not had a chance to view the document that they should have been referencing, would it be possible to circulate them around the members? Absolutely. The ones that I have referenced that are not in the papers, yes, I will. Hugh Gillis. I am notwithstanding everything that has gone before and I appreciate that we have come out to come back on the early exchanges. One of the things that we have had to weigh in terms of the extension of the north-west and the south-west contract for the two-year extension from 2018 to 2020 would be the future-shaping form of 5G. If I can take you back to what we require, an extended conversation about the future of Rose administration in Scotland and we have been asked specifically—at the end of the day, if any criminality—it is reiterating what has gone before—if any criminality, any fraud, there would be no question that we would not have extended those contracts, but we did notwithstanding that, weigh the fact that there have been requests from local government, from COSLA and SOLAS to extend, to give them the opportunity to get ready to discuss 5G and what future road administration in Scotland will look like. If we handed that, we would be in a 5G procurement process now and we would have probably stuck with the model that we had more or less in terms of the trunk road network being administered and operated through an operating contract model. No, I mean, I understand that the investigation concluded that there was no criminality involved. What surprises me? It is this committee's job to follow the public pound. What surprises me is that this Scottish Government is extending contracts to a contractor who has a track and proven record of overcharging the Scottish Government. I thank you all for your evidence this morning. I now move the committee into private session.