HC Deb 19 July 1976 vol 915 cc1481-92

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Graham.]

1.24 a.m.

Mr. Hamish Gray (Ross and Cromarty)

I am very glad to have the opportunity of raising, even at this late hour, on the Adjournment, a subject which is causing both anxiety and annoyance to many of my constituents, and, indeed, to thousands of people throughout the Highlands of Scotland—namely the delays over the construction of the proposed bridge at Kessock which will link the A9 between Inverness and Ross and Cromarty. There has been unwarranted delay on the part of the Government, but before I itemise my criticisms of the way in which the matter has been handled, perhaps I should briefly recall the events which have led to the present situation.

The intention of the 1966 Labour Government was to effect improvements to the A9 North of Inverness via Beauly, Conon and Dingwall to Invergordon. This envisaged considerable widening over what was in reality a horseshoe route, and in the late 1960s a campaign was initiated for the bridging of the Beauly Firth between Longman on the Inverness, or southern, side, and Craigton Point on the Ross and Cromarty, or northern, side. The new road was then to cut across the Black Isle to Tore, where a link for westbound traffic was to be provided, while the north traffic would continue to cross the Cromarty Firth by a barrage or bridge near Evanton. The saving in road mileage was to be considerable. Between Inverness and Tain 15 miles would be saved over the original Beauly route; between Inverness and Invergordon 14 miles; and between Inverness and Muir of Ord, five miles.

Indeed, the proposers of this plan went further and suggested the crossing of the Dornoch Firth, thus bringing much benefit to Sutherland. An article by Reay Clark, a past president of the Easter Ross NFU, and John Smith, at that time a lecturer at Aberdeen University, appeared in The Scotsman of 10th May 1969, which outlined the proposal. This was followed some time later by a booklet entitled "The Crossing of the Three Firths" produced by those already mentioned with the assistance of Pat Hunter Gordon, then the managing director of a well-known Highland engineering company.

So compelling were the arguments presented that after the 1970 General Election the then Secretary of State, Mr. Gordon Campbell, now Lord Campbell of Croy, commissioned a feasibility study to consider the proposals, and on 7th April 1971, in answer to an oral Question from me, he announced his decision to adopt the Black Isle route, including the bridging of the crossings of the Beauly and Cromarty Firths. Consultations with the local authorities followed and the acquisition of the necessary land proceeded. This has, I understand, now been completed for some time and the approach roads to the sites of both bridges are in an advanced state of construction.

To date, however, the tale of the bridges is less than satisfactory, for while the planning for the roadworks has proceeded, the forward thinking about the Kessock Bridge has been, to say the least, painfully slow. From the outset, it must have been obvious to the roads department of the Scottish Development Department that the Kessock Bridge would not only be the most expensive single project in the whole development, but that it would be the most demanding in engineering design skill.

I wrote to the Secretary of State late in 1971, suggesting that the bridge be the subject of a design competition, but I was advised that the aesthetic values would be fully considered by the design team. Over the years I have kept in touch with various Ministers concerned, both by letter and in discussion, in an effort to ensure that progress on the bridge was accelerated. But, despite my efforts and the considerable support which I received from others who had the same object in view, it was not until the spring of 1975 that offers were obtained from contractors.

At this point disaster struck, and the originally estimated figure of £6 million to £8 million became £30 million. The Government decided to look again, but, regrettably, at a snail's pace. Meanwhile, the development of Easter Ross, potentially the most attractive area for development and job creation in Scotland, continues to be deprived of this important fast link with Inverness and the south. The crossings of the Cromarty and Beauly Firths are essential to such development, while the crossing of the third Firth at Dornoch is highly desirable if depopulation of Sutherland and Caithness is to be arrested.

The amount of correspondence that I have had with Ministers is very great. I do not intend to delay the House at this time of night by going over each letter, but two are significant. On 19th September 1975 the Minister of State, Scottish Office, Lord Kirkhill, wrote in reply to my letter of 2nd September, in which I had raised a number of queries about the Kessock Bridge, saying: Nevertheless, matters of much technical complexity are involved, the weighing and determination of which must take some time … The Secretary of State has, however, undertaken to make a further statement in Parliament as soon as it is practicable to do so. My comment on that letter is that, while I agree that matters of much technical complexity are involved", this letter is dated 19th September 1975 and the decision to bridge the Beauly Firth was taken in April 1971. Therefore, the complexity and the technical difficulties are no greater now than they were when that decision was taken. The Scottish Office has had those years to consider how best it can deal with the matter. As for the final sentence in that letter of 19th September 1975, in which the Secretary of State undertook to make a statement in Parliament, to my knowledge that statement has not yet been made.

On 19th December 1975 I received another letter from Lord Kirkhill. That was in reply to yet another letter of mine dated 9th December in which I raised the whole question of progress. In his letter the Minister of State said: As I said in my letter of 19th September, the technical and economic factors involved are complex; detailed studies and assessments of them are being undertaken, including the consideration of alternatives of various kinds". That is all very well, but I submit that, while those are important matters, they are not new and there has been a period of years over which they could have been considered and ironed out.

The estimated cost of a redesigned Kessock Bridge is now £20 million, and it is to be hoped that contract prices will be within this figure. If the bridge does not commence until 1978, it is unlikely that it will be completed before mid-1979 at the earliest and, even with the most optimistic estimate of inflation, the final cost by that time could be close to £30 million. Would it not, therefore, be much more realistic to cut the corners and Scottish Office red tape and go all out for a commencement in the spring of 1977?

The professional advice which I have received considers that this should be perfectly possible. Contractors or consortia wishing to be considered had to submit their names and experience by 5th July. A selection could be made, I would assume, within six weeks, and a further two months should be sufficient to produce initial design and cost estimates, allowing a further two months for the Department to access the proposals and, always, of course assuming the willingness of the Scottish Development Department to co-operate and not to frustrate progress, there is little reason why the project should not be under way next spring.

I put it to the Government that they have had not months but years to consider the problems of design and construction, and I suggest that they are using these as excuses for not proceeding with the work, whereas the real reason is that they have committed so much of the nation's budget to unnecessary and unwanted nationalisation projects, for which they have had to borrow millions of pounds, that vital infrastructure such as the Kessock Bridge is being held back. Let me suggest to the Government that they get their priorities right. Cut-backs in Government spending are necessary—nobody would disagree with that except Government Members below the Gangway and the Tribune Group—but it was the Prime Minister himself who only last week at a miners' gala said that the importance of oil and steel were paramount.

I suggest that the Kessock Bridge comes into this category, where priority must be given to the future development of an oil-related area, and the ability to provide a massive contribution to the regeneration of British industry should not be overlooked. I understand that local consortia are hoping to be allowed to compete, and I trust that they will be given an opportunity to tender. I know that at least one platform yard is capable of making a contribution to the building of this structure, and this has the added advantage of supplying jobs locally.

Tourism, which still plays a major part in the life of the area, is very important indeed and it, too, would benefit from the advantages of the new bridge. The amount of industrial development in Easter Ross is considerable, and potential developers and executives of companies already located in Easter Ross have an unnecessarily long and delayed journey to reach the nearest airport of Dalcross. That is another argument in favour of the project.

I hope that tonight the Minister will be able to give the House an assurance that there will be a special effort by the Scottish Office to use every device to short-circuit procedures and get on with this job, for I maintain that the whole future development of the Highland area could hinge upon the action taken by the Government in this regard.

This is not a party matter. Indeed, in the Highlands all parties are concerned about the future of this area. It has tremendous potential. The Kessock Bridge is a vital link, and I cannot impress on the Minister too strongly the view of the area. I hope that he will be able to satisfy me with his reply.

I am grateful to the Minister of State for coming here at this late hour to answer the debate. I hope that his reply will be acceptable both to me and to my constituents.

1.40 a.m.

The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Mr. Gregor MacKenzie)

We should all be grateful to the hon. Member for Ross and Cromarty (Mr. Gray) for the way in which he has introduced this subject. I am also grateful to him because this debate gives me the opportunity to discuss this matter in more detail than is possible in the normal exchange of questions and answers across the House. I should also like to deal with some of the misconceptions which have got around.

People who are anxious to see this bridge started are grasping at any idea which can be used to suggest that the timetable my noble Friend Lord Kirkhill proposed last February to the Highland Regional Council is unduly long and imply that the Government are dragging their feet. It is quite true that my noble Friend properly drew attention to the effect which the economic climate might have on his target for the starting date but there is no question of uncertainty holding up the preliminary work.

The hon. Member suggested that we were procrastinating and that one of our mistakes was to overestimate the time needed before a contract could start. I should like to deal with the second point first. If one were willing to accept risks, which seem to me to be quite unacceptable when one is responsible for public money, it might be possible to start in about six months. It would require the acceptance of a design which had already been prepared and the selection of a single contractor without any element of competition—in other words a monopoly situation and a design which would still require modification and which would still have to be checked. All large bridges are unique to their locality and even if a design of a bridge of the right span were available it would still require adaptation to the site conditions and, if foreign in derivation, would have to be checked to see whether it were suitable to our loading conditions.

The contractual arrangements which we are following involve the selection, after careful consideration, of a limited number of contractors from the list of those who have tabled their interest. The selected contractors will then be invited to submit outline designs and budget estimates in sufficient detail to enable the suitability of the designs to be evaluated and a fair comparison made of their cost estimates. The successful contractor will then be chosen and invited to complete the design, negotiate a contract and, if this is carried out satisfactorily, to start work. The independent design check, which took a year for the design which went to tender last year, must be fitted in.

If we speed up the tender processes, we shall be unable to complete the design in detail and to carry out the independent structural check before we are firmly committed. The structural check is a condition imposed on the building of highway bridges by Government as a result of the major bridge disasters, such as Yarra and Milford Haven. The Kessock Bridge is a major bridge requiring great experience in its designers and it would be folly to undertake it in too short a time.

Amongst the peculiar problems of this bridge is the need to design for earthquake shocks because of the Highland fault and the need to apply wind tunnel tests to the deck section. Long-span cable-stayed bridges can suffer from the type of flutter which destroyed the Tacoma Narrows bridge in America, and the wind tunnel check is most important where a bridge crosses open waters where high winds are quite common. Another problem peculiar to this site is the exceptional depth before one reaches rock and the difficulty of designing acceptable foundations at a reasonable depth and cost. Again, the penalties for mistakes are very high and the foundations are the first bit of work to be undertaken.

On the financial side the risk which we would run if we tried to accelerate the design/tender period too much would be a loosened control of the costs. If an outline design is too rough when it is accepted at a budget price, further detailed design could well bring about changes which could be used to "justify" large increases in price. Finally, we have appointed eminent consulting engineers to assist in the evaluation of the designs, and it is a fact that in the preliminary discussion of the proposals of the firms who have asked to be considered, not one of the engineers concerned considered that the time allowed by our timetable was excessive.

I hope that that deals with the view that there is some way in which the design and contracting period can be drastically shortened. It cannot. The hon. Member implied, however, that this was merely a part of a general atmosphere of procrastination. This I deny absolutely. It is true that during the last Tory Administration his ministerial friends hazarded some rather optimistic estimates of the time it would take to complete the reconstruction of the route from Perth to Ardullie on the Cromarty Firth, but this was before any detailed technical examination of the problems involved had taken place before all the procedural difficulties in establishing a new line for A9 had come to light and before the economic climate became as difficult as it is now. Nevertheless, we might examine the progress with the Kessock bridge.

Mr. Gray

I accept what the Minister says to a certain extent, but when my hon. and right hon. Friends were in office they were presumably advised about the statements which they made on the time scale by the people who are now advising the Minister. How can he stand at the Dispatch Box tonight and suggest that the advice they gave to my hon. and right hon. Friends was inaccurate at that time and the advice they give him now is correct?

Mr. MacKenzie

I did not say that the statements made by the noble Lord the former Secretary of State were inaccurate. I said that in my view, for what it is worth, they were optimistic. It is true that the people who advised him advise me, but it is up to Ministers to make a judgment. It is not for civil servants to justify themselves nor for Ministers to justify civil servants. Whatever has to be done has to be done by Ministers, and the judgment is that of myself and my noble Friend the Minister of State.

The trunk road orders were made in September 1972. This could be said to be the formal starting date, although a good deal of preliminary thought had been given to the ways of crossing the Beauly Firth. It is interesting to note in passing that the tender documents for the bridge were ready and were issued in January 1975 nearly two-and-a-half years later. This compares with the talk now about six months being sufficient.

It was, however, hoped that the work could be expedited by dividing the work and placing first a contract for the piers and foundations, so that they could be built while the superstructure design was being completed. The tenders for the piers and foundations were received in October 1973, but the hon. Member's noble Friend, Lord Campbell of Croy, who was then Secretary of State, rejected them because they were too high. He thought that the right course would be to include this work with the superstructure in a single tender for the whole bridge. I do not blame the noble Lord for this because I think that he was right, and no question of blame arises. But the decision delayed work on the piers, although it was hoped that time lost would be recovered later. If, however, the hon. Member thinks that this decision was part of a process of procrastination, he should not lay the blame on me but on his noble Friend Lord Campbell of Croy.

As I say, the tenders for the bridge were issued in January 1975 and what happened then is recent history. As was fully explained in a statement to the hon. Member by the Secretary of State on 24th July 1975, the lowest of four tenders received for building Kessock Bridge as a steel structure was for more than £30 million and was also subject to very considerable qualifications. A preference for building in steel had emerged from the preliminary design study done by the consulting engineers in the early 1970s and reflected their assessment of the needs of this particular bridge.

It must be remembered that the bridge will cross 1,060 metres of open water where conditions can be rough, that sufficient clearance in height and width must be provided for shipping, and that a considerably longer span—240 metres—is therefore required to give a clear channel of the desired width. The conversion of these requirements into engineering reality, particularly in an inflationary period, created major difficulties. As the statement of 24th July last said: While, as the design was developed and as economic conditions changed, it became clear that the cost would be much higher, a figure as high as £30 million was never contemplated. Nor was it foreseen, in April 1971, that the bridge would have to be built in competition for skilled labour with the oil production platform yards at Nigg and Ardersier". In these circumstances, it was decided that that expenditure could not be justified, particularly at a time of severe restraint on public expenditure, that the tender for this amount should not be accepted, and that the possibilities both of using an alternative form of contract for appropriate parts of the work and of adopting a more economical design as well as an alternative form of construction should be investigated. So far as I know, there has not been any serious criticism of the wisdom of this decision.

The search for a more economical design and a contractual method has entailed a great deal of work. There were also discussions with Inverness Harbour Trust about the possibility of reducing the navigation span as a means of widening the design field with the aim of allowing a cheaper design of bridge to be adopted. The trust, however, was unwilling to prejudice the future development of the harbour, and three alternative design possibilities which had been put forward, all including a reduced navigation span, could not be pursued.

Here I may interpolate that during these discussions there was no real argument with the trust and that my Department accepts without reserve that a 240-metre span is necessary. Nevertheless, a good deal of time was spent earlier this year dealing with the belief which got around that the key to a quick start on the bridge lay in the reduction in length of the main span. The opposite was indeed the truth, since, if the span were reduced, the main piers would have to be recited and consequential changes designed into all the approach spans, and this would all have taken more time. Also, there was no guarantee that the effect of all this change on the total cost of the crossing from shore to shore would be of any significance.

By the spring of this year, these exploratory activities had achieved encouraging results in that it had become clear that alternative—and cheaper—solutions were possible at Kessock, although a wide and complex range of problems, technical and financial, remained to be solved before a feasible solution could be worked out in detail. Early in June, therefore, contractors who wished to tender for the design and construction of the bridge—in steel or concrete—were invited to submit their names to the Scottish Development Department by 5th July. This they have done, and I am glad to say that it will be possible to arrange for the receipt of competitive designs in both steel and concrete. The process of selecting the firms which should be invited is now in progress.

Obviously, the timetable for the construction of the bridge has slipped beyond the optimistic hopes of 1973, but the cause has been the pressure of events and not deliberate delay of any kind. For the current position, I would come back to the statement which my noble Friend Lord Kirkhill made at his meeting with the Highland Regional Council last February. This was that we would be pursuing the possibility of an alternative design for the Kessock bridge which might cost about £20 million and which, given a favourable economic climate, might start to be constructed early in 1978. After all the to-ings and fro-ings of the last few months, that remains the position.

Mr. Gray

Before the Minister sits down—

The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock on Monday evening, and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. DEPUTY SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at six minutes to Two o'clock.