Former Labour MSP for Paisley North
I have a helpful question for the minister. Last summer, the Scottish Government was helpful enough to provide to the independent budget review a figure of £8 billion for the estimated costs to the public purse of delivery of the RPP by 2020. Given the refinement work that has been going on over the past six months, is there an updated figure? Does the £8 billion figure stand or has it...
To ask the Scottish Executive what level of committed grid investment there is and planned grid investment it envisages over the next 10 years, broken down by (a) year, (b) project and (c) investor.
I pay tribute to my committee colleagues, who are all highly experienced parliamentarians in their own right, and to the clerks, to the Scottish Parliament information centre and to our advisers. Ours was the first-ever committee dedicated to considering a bill. According to the spin, we would simply rubber-stamp it, we would not study the Government’s alternative and we would make few...
To ask the Scottish Executive what its position is on how an independent Scotland would use collateral in the remaining North Sea oil and gas reserves to support its banks.
I welcome a number of the individual measures that have been announced today, but the way in which our final budget has emerged—following deals in what in the old days would have been smoke-filled but which these day are smokeless rooms—means that it is easy to lose sight of the longer-term trends. The last-minute deals on what are fairly small sums of money miss the longer-term trends in...
To ask the Scottish Executive what the planned completion date was for the Baillieston to Newhouse M8 upgrade in May 2007 and what the current estimated completion date is. (S3O-12528)
Can the minister offer the chamber and country any explanation for the more than four-year delay that has occurred on his watch in completing the last 10 miles of motorway link between Glasgow and Edinburgh?
The minister has helpfully influenced that limit of 10 per cent on the time that can be handed over to non-teachers. I want that issue to be debated publicly. Given that, will the minister simply call for a delay of the decision at 1 o'clock today, which I mentioned earlier and which would for the first time hand over 10 per cent of time to non-teachers? Will she or her colleagues make the...
