To ask the Scottish Government how it will ensure transport links remain open during incidents of severe weather. (S6O-05381)

Transport Scotland has contracts in place with its operating companies to ensure that the trunk road network is safe, efficient and well managed during periods of severe weather.

Transport Scotland works in close partnership with other transport operators, including ScotRail, and with key agencies such as the Met Office and Police Scotland, through established multi-agency response team—MART—arrangements, which can be activated during severe weather events to support a co-ordinated and effective response to large-scale network disruption. Such arrangements, which form part of the Scottish Government’s wider resilience response, were active during the weather warning periods at the end of December and the beginning of January. I thank all partners for their important work over a prolonged period.

Maintaining strong collaboration with contractors and partners across the Scottish Government is central to planning and preparing for, and responding to, both planned and unplanned events, and it helps to keep Scotland’s transport links operating wherever it is safe to do so.

I remind members of my entry in the register of members’ interests: I am a partner in a farming business.

The recent severe weather left communities across the Highlands and Islands cut off. The Cabinet secretary will know what impact that can have on our rural communities. Patients who had to travel down the A9 and other roads faced issues, folk were cut off from care support in the Highlands and in Orkney, where I was, and people struggled to get to work in the public and private sectors, which has a massive knock-on effect on local businesses.

Farmers were affected, too, some of whom struggled to get to different parts of their farms or some of their more remote landholdings to check on livestock. Many of those same farmers were also busy helping to keep local roads free and helping out in their communities more generally. Is the Scottish Government considering my Scottish Conservative Highlands and Islands colleague Tim Eagle’s call for the Minister for Agriculture and Connectivity, Jim Fairlie, to look at how it might reward farmers for their community spirit and their efforts?

I put on record—as the First Minister did at the time—our thanks to everyone involved, including members of the farming community, who are obviously part of their local communities, for their efforts in helping to support their neighbours and colleagues. As the member might be aware, some of that activity is undertaken on a contracted basis. In Aberdeenshire, the amount of such activity that is undertaken by farmers on a contracted basis has increased. However, the voluntary effort, too, was significant.

The patience of so many people over such a prolonged time was a credit to the communities affected. Mutual aid was delivered to neighbouring councils by various local authorities. Transport Scotland provided and co-ordinated mutual aid to Aberdeenshire Council, and it helped Network Rail to make sure that the lines were open by helping signallers to get to where they needed to be.

With the exchange of assets, it is important that everybody pulls together. The public recognition and thanks have been given. There are more established arrangements that already exist in different parts of the country that are more directly led by local delivery partners through their strategic response, and they were working solidly right from the end of December.