‘Each time I hear the helicopters I think Oh God, what now?’ 62 people have been killed on the A9 since the SNP first promised to dual it. And those living nearby are haunted …
From her cottage in the Highland hamlet of Kincraig, Laura Hansler has grown to dread the noise coming from the nearby A9.
But it is never the near-constant roar of traffic which troubles her – that comes almost as a form of comfort.
It is when the rush of cars, and buses and motorbikes and lorries suddenly falls silent that a growing sense of unease builds and she finds herself waiting for the blare of emergency sirens that inevitably follows.
‘For the communities living around here, the minute we hear a siren out on the A9 we collectively hold our breaths because we are wondering what’s coming next,’ she said.
‘If there’s any accidents at all then the emergency services will come through Kincraig and you’ll either hear them on the A9 or you’ll hear them coming through the town to cut back round to an accident further north or south.
Emergency services, including an air ambulance, attend a crash on the notorious A9, this time near Newtonmore
‘Also, the helicopters follow the A9 down to find the accidents and they go right over the top of my house.
‘I’m getting to the point now where I know the difference between the coastguard and the air ambulance because they make a different sound. You hear the air ambulance and you think, “Oh God, no, what is it now?”’
The sense of dread is palpable. Having witnessed the distressing familiarity of such scenes since moving to the area two decades ago, Ms Hansler is only too aware of what will follow in the sirens’ wake.
There will be chaos and carnage, there will be lives lost or irrevocably altered as the shockwaves of another tragedy reverberate along Scotland’s ‘killer road’.
Meanwhile, access to this key transit corridor, known as Scotland’s backbone, between Perth and Inverness will be cut for hours as police and accident investigators try to work out what went wrong. Increasingly likely, the cause will have been a crash on one of the many sections of this major arterial route that have yet to be turned into dual carriageway.
Certainly, damning statistics from Transport Scotland – the government’s own roads department – bear out that the undualled sections of the A9 are twice as deadly as the dualled sections.
The figures, obtained under a Freedom of Information request by the Scottish Conservatives, reveal that from 2020 to 2023 inclusive, there were 15 deaths and 199 injuries on single-carriage sections of the road, compared to seven and 114 respectively for dualled sections.
Despite the appalling toll, however, the Scottish Government has already admitted that the £3.7billion project to complete the dualling of the 89-mile stretch between Perth and the Highland capital will be delayed by a decade.
Having first announced in 2011 that it would dual the A9 by 2025, the SNP administration last year conceded it would not now be dualled in its entirety until 2035.
Even that target is not certain after Finance Secretary Shona Robison told ministers last week that new ‘emergency controls’ on spending would be introduced with immediate effect.
‘They have blood on their hands’
And while Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop insisted the commitment to full dualling remains ‘unwavering’, campaigners sense an ever-preset fear things could grind to a halt with just 11 miles of the remaining 83 actually dualled to date.
Scottish Conservative transport spokesman Graham Simpson said: ‘The SNP’s shameful record of broken promises on dualling the A9 has already led to the project falling a decade behind schedule, while earlier this week the Finance Secretary announced “emergency spending”.
‘Given Shona Robison has warned that only “unavoidable” spending commitments will now go ahead, the Transport Secretary must now be clear that she has been assured the A9 dualling falls into this category and won’t be further delayed by SNP cuts. If not, then her “unwavering commitment” to 2035 is not worth the paper it’s written on.’
Ministers will doubtless point to the recent awarding of the contract to dual the Tomatin to Moy section and last week’s announcement shortlisting contractors to bid for the next phase as evidence of progress, but critics point out that such decisions are already years overdue. And amid the time-wasting, lives continue to be lost.
According to the Scottish Government’s own figures, 62 people have died on the Perth to Inverness stretch between the SNP’s pledge to dual the A9 in 2011 and the end of 2023.
The dreadful toll has continued into this year. In March alone, the first of three separate incidents claimed the life of 60-year-old Roy Bannerman, of Evanton, Easter Ross, while a 90-year-old man died after a collision near Newtonmore, and a ten-year-old girl was left in a critical but stable condition after a three-vehicle collision near Dalwhinnie.
In May, 42-year-old Morven Gordon, from Aviemore, was killed in a two-vehicle crash at the notorious accident black-spot of The Slochd.
In June, a 65-year-old woman died when the Volkswagen Multivan she was a passenger in collided with a Toyota Hilux near Carrbridge, Inverness-shire.
Four other people were hospitalised. Later that month, a 63-year-old biker was killed in a crash between a Hyundai car and two Harley Davidsons around 1.30pm on the A9 near Calvine in Highland Perthshire.
A 50-year-old woman has since been arrested and charged with causing death by dangerous driving.
The road was closed for around nine hours in both directions for police to conduct inquiries, causing huge tailbacks on one of the hottest days of the year so far. Local businesses came to the rescue of stranded drivers bringing water and food until they were able to leave.
All the incidents took place on those treacherous single carriageway stretches. More recently, there have been six serious accidents in less than a fortnight on undualled sections.
Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop says the Scottish Government’s commitment to full dualling remains ‘unwavering’
All are documented by Ms Hansler and her frustrated fellow campaigners on the A9 Dual Action Group page on Facebook.
‘Every time the Scottish Government have dragged their heels over this since 2011, we have lost lives needlessly,’ said Ms Hansler, a retired scientist, who moved from Glasgow after a career in cardiac rehabilitation.
‘They have blood on their hands. The amount of deaths and the types of accidents we have wouldn’t be tolerated on the M8, the M9 or the M90, it just wouldn’t.
‘And although the upgrading of this road was promised back in 2007, the volume of traffic and types of vehicles we’re getting up now far exceeds even the predictions back then. It’s just not good enough.’
The tortuous 17-year history of its dualling runs like a thread through the SNP’s management of public infrastructure projects – all missed targets and broken promises.
Transport Scotland estimated the benefit to the economy of the A9 dualling project and the A96 upgrade to be £5.8billion. Inverness is one of the fastest growing cities in Europe and investment is being ploughed into the free-port at Invergordon.
Aside from the Scottish Greens, whose MSP Maggie Chapman was widely lambasted during a Holyrood debate for arguing that ‘road building is a subsidy for wealthy, usually white men’, it is a project nearly everyone seems to want yet no one seems capable of delivering.
‘Political will to do the job just wasn’t there’
All the main political parties – who attended a cross-party summit last week – support the A9 dualling scheme and the civil engineering sector who will do the work and private finance who may help pay for it, are said to be keen for it to happen. It should boost the economy and save lives.
But with nearly 33,500 vehicles a day using the road, most motorists are doubtless more focused on saving their skins than driving the economy.
Over the years, the authorities have introduced average speed cameras and raised the speed limit for HGVs from 40mph to 50mph to reduce accidents with limited success, but the shifts between single and dual sections have been cited as a factor in past crashes by causing confusion among holidaymakers and foreign tourists unused to the road. With the holiday season still in full flight, emergency services remain on alert.
How different to the fanfare with which Alex Salmond’s government promised in 2011 to finally widen the A9 by 2025 at a rate of roughly six miles a year.
But Salmond came and went as First Minister, as did Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf.
Now, with John Swinney in charge and just a year away from when the entire route should have been dualled, only two of the 11 identified sections of the A9 have since been completed.
Industry experts are not surprised. ‘The civil engineering sector in Scotland – contractors and consultants – have known for many years that the promise to dual the section of the A9 between Perth and Inverness by 2025 would not be met,’ Grahame Barn, chief executive of the Civil Engineering Contractors Association Scotland, told a meeting of Holyrood’s citizen participation and public petitions committee earlier this year.
‘The pace at which design and development work and subsequent road orders for each of the 11 sections has been carried out can be best described as being glacial.
‘There is a suspicion amongst contractors that this slow pace has been deliberate as there has been insufficient budget allocated to allow these sections to be procured.’ When asked why the original timescales were not kept to, Mr Barn, who represents 80 per cent of the civil engineering sector in Scotland, said: ‘The political will to provide the funding required to do the job just wasn’t there when required.
‘I believe the target was achievable. It was difficult and challenging, but I believe it was achievable.’
He said that ‘other political priorities, perhaps, took over’, adding: ‘Funding might have been diverted away or funding was never there in the first place to be able to allow it to be completed within the time frame.’
When Ms Sturgeon appeared before the same committee, she offered ‘regret’ for the loss of life on the A9. The people of the Highlands and Islands were right to feel aggrieved, she conceded, but she blamed ‘austerity’, ‘Brexit’, ‘the pandemic’, ‘technical changes in public private finances’, ‘Ukraine’, ‘Covid’, ‘Westminster government’, ‘the cost-of-living crisis’, ‘a whole range of circumstances many beyond our control’ for why construction had stalled. And yet the timetable was set by her government.
When Mr Salmond appeared before the same committee, he dismissed such excuses, saying ‘transport, inflation, contractors, but that’s life.
I don’t think we can blame Vladimir or wars. I don’t think we can blame either war. The only excuse that carries any weight is the pandemic.
I think the government might have an alibi in losing two years to Covid, but otherwise the excuses are pathetic.’
For Mr Barn there was another important reason for the sclerotic progress, bound up with Transport Scotland’s peculiar insistence on using a type of standard contract which places all of the financial risks onto the contractor.
Nowhere else in Britain uses that model of contract, said Mr Barn, because it is deeply unattractive to companies whose profit margins are already tight.
‘Those risks include, but are not limited to, ground conditions, weather, utilities and third-party consultations.
‘They can all take up time and that means that, when the contract is a fixed-price one with time penalties at the end, the risk all lies with the contractor,’ he said.
The result was contractors were disinclined to bid for roadbuilding contracts, given their profit margin is usually less than 3 per cent. Tellingly, when the most recent section set to be dualled, between Tomatin to Moy, went out for procurement, only one bid was put in, which was rejected as unsuitable by Transport Scotland.
Under pressure from the petitions committee, Transport Scotland agreed to tweak the contract to spread the risk more equitably between client and contractor.
Last month, just days after the SNP’s catastrophic showing in the General Election, Scottish ministers revealed that Balfour Beatty Civil Engineering Ltd was now set to be awarded the £184.7million contract to dual the six-mile section and extend unbroken dualling 20 miles from Inverness to The Slochd.
Last week, Ms Hyslop announced a shortlist of contractors who will be invited to the next stage of the procurement process for the fourth section of the project, from the Tay Crossing to Ballinluig.
‘The sense of dread is palpable’
There is hope that the new-style contract will attract more bidders for future sections and speed up the process, but there are no guarantees, according to Inverness and Nairn MSP, Fergus Ewing, who has long campaigned for the A9 to be dualled.
With major upgrades to the national grid and the water supply network in the north soon coming on tap, the A9 faces a different race against time.
‘Within the next ten years, SSEN alone is contracted by Ofgem to spend £45billion on gridwork, which is unparalleled,’ he said.
‘On top of that you have lots of other infrastructure work with new school builds and Scottish Water spending £1billion a year upgrading their water and sewage plants and their pump storage schemes, which are absolutely massive, so the problems in the future may be different from the problems in the past.
Inverness and Nairn MSP Fergus Ewing has long campaigned for the A9 to be dualled
‘Transport Scotland need to be attuned to what’s happening to make sure they can get somebody to do the work.
‘Because there’s only so much capacity to do civil engineering work, it’s labour-intensive and SSEN are busy signing up engineers from all over the place in advance before their contracts have begun.
‘You will find that many engineers working for local authorities, for example, will have been approached.
‘If we don’t do this work soon, the contractors will be pursuing the more profitable work than the roads contract.’
For his part, the First Minister has insisted that the political will remains to get the job done, adding: ‘One death on our roads is one too many.’
Following a recent cross-party summit, Mr Swinney doubled down on his government’s commitment to ensuring this ‘essential route through the Highlands must be safe, reliable and resilient – and that is why we continue to be steadfast in our commitment to delivering A9 dualling’.
Fine words, but for many living beside the A9 that is all they have been hearing for too long.
That, and the plaintive cry of the emergency sirens.
References
- ^ Gavin Madeley For The Scottish Daily Mail (www.dailymail.co.uk)