Highland Roads Plans In Disarray

12.24.56pm BST (GMT +0100) Fri 24th Jul 2009

Document reveals severe delays to major road projects across Highlands

Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey Lib Dem MP Danny Alexander is demanding answers from the Scottish Government after it emerged that existing plans for road upgrades in the Highlands are in disarray.

Mr Alexander has discovered a Scottish government document which shows that almost every upgrade which the SNP Government inherited in May 2007 has fallen badly behind schedule. Upgrades on the A9, the A96, the A82 and the A95 have all been hit by substantial delays.

The Scottish Government has faced questions over its failure to publish a quarterly update of progress with trunk road projects since June 2007. In December, Transport Minister Stewart Stevenson reassured the Scottish Parliament that there had been ‘little in the way of substantive change'. However, Mr Alexander has now discovered that an update of the position at March 2009 has now been published, apparently without announcement, on the Transport Scotland website.

Whereas just 7 projects were originally expected to begin in the final year of the programme (2010/11), the delays have pushed that number up fourfold to 29 – with a major likely knock-on effect to the projects agreed by the Strategic Transport Projects Review which are expected to begin the following year.

Commenting, Danny Alexander said:

“This document provides a startling and overdue insight into the chaos at the heart of the SNP’s transport policy. Slipped onto a website with no fanfare, it reveals severe delays in much-needed projects across the Highlands.

“While Ministers concentrate on wild and unfunded promises, the real and funded plans which they inherited to improve roads in the Highlands are being allowed to unravel – out of sight of the public.

“Who would have thought that when the SNP promised to dual the A9, they meant they would delay the extension to the dualled section at Crubenmore by at least 2 years, and delay its completion beyond their term of office? The news is no better for planned overtaking lanes from Kincraig to Dalraddy and at the Slochd.

“This document raises very serious questions about this Government’s failure to publish quarterly progress reports, and the accuracy of the answer which the Minister gave to Parliament in December.”