Achi news desk-
However, ministers admitted last December that this could not be achieved, saying it would be 2035 before the work could be completed.
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Appearing before the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee, David Torrance, SNP MSP for Kirkcaldy, asked the Alba Party what he understood from officials who said the 2025 completion date was challenging.
He said: “I think that was from a ministerial briefing in April 2012 and the phrase, if I remember correctly, is challenging but achievable.
“I would expect it to be challenging because if you take it as a whole it’s the biggest construction project in Scottish history, so obviously that’s challenging.
“Also Mr Neil was setting the pace so it would be ambitious but achievable because as Mr Neil told you in evidence, he took the precautions to tell the officers what the best possible date is achievable and come up with the date 2025. So challenging and achievable, I would expect it to be challenging and I would expect it to be achievable.”
Mr Torrance asked: “Were you ever told that no officers could meet this date?”
Mr Salmond replied: “No, I wasn’t.”
The former prime minister said the project was on schedule between 2011 and 2014.
He said: “Everything was on time. I know because Alex Neil would have told me if it wasn’t on the schedule.”
North East Tory MSP Maurice Golden asked Mr Salmond what was behind the delay.
Mr Salmond said that if the committee considered a delay of two years it would be acceptable to attribute it to the pandemic, but that other excuses were “pathetic”.
He said: “I think we can remove the various excuses that have been made – transport inflation, contractor inflation, I’m afraid that’s part of the slings and arrows of doing anything, that happens, that’s life. I don’t think war is an acceptable reason, but again that is part of the effect on inflation.
“I think basically what you’re talking about is the priority. What you’re left with is sometime after 2014, I suspect after 2016 when John Swinney stopped being finance secretary, but certainly after 2014, other priorities somehow became more important.”
He said he does not know what these priorities were, but “somewhere the language of the priority changed after 2014 and became less of a critical commitment”.
He added: “I’m not saying people wouldn’t want to do it, but other things must have hampered the capital budget.”
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He said that in the case of the A9, the Scottish Greens do not bear a “heavy burden of responsibility” for the delay given that they were not in government until relatively recently.
Mr Salmond also suggested bringing Mr Neil back as “some sort of tsar” in order to get transport projects he started back on track.
He said he hoped that when John Swinney is now Prime Minister he will feel “duty and honour” to carry out the project as it is “so intricately involved” in setting the commitments.
