25 September 2009

SNP Ministers must come clean on a suggestion from one of their own MSPs that Scottish Government support for the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route may be at risk, Aberdeen Central Labour MSP Lewis Macdonald said today.

Lewis Macdonald has demanded urgent answers from Finance Secretary John Swinney, following claims by SNP backbencher Maureen Watt that the WPR would be at risk if SNP Ministers reinstated the Glasgow Airport Rail Link cancelled last week.

Lewis Macdonald was Deputy Transport Minister in January 2003, when First Minister Jack McConnell and Enterprise and Transport Minister Iain Gray gave the go-ahead to the WPR. He has been pressing Ministers for months to explain how they intend to fund the WPR, and to publish a construction timetable.

Lewis Macdonald said today:

"No politician from any party has talked of cancelling the WPR since the decision to build it was taken by Labour Ministers in 2003, until Maureen Watt raised that possibility today.

"Maureen Watt was an SNP Government Minister until a few months ago. She appears to believe that, if the Glasgow Airport Rail Link had not been cancelled, the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route would have been next in line for the chop.

"Why does a recent member of the Scottish Government believe the WPR is at risk? Did SNP Ministers have to choose between cancelling GARL and cancelling the WPR? If cancelling the Glasgow Airport project does not save enough money to pay for their financial recklessness, will the WPR be the next transport project they cancel?

"Only a few weeks ago, transport Minister Stewart Stevenson gave Glasgow MSPs a firm assurance that the Airport Rail Link project would go ahead. Then the SNP scrapped it. Last week, he refused to set out a timetable for the WPR, but asserted the project would happen. Now Maureen Watt has raised the possibility they will scrap that too.

"That is why I have written to Stewart Stevenson’s boss, John Swinney, to seek urgent clarification of how and why the WPR has come under threat, and I have tabled parliamentary questions about what other projects he has considered cancelling.

"People in and around Aberdeen have waited too long already for the WPR. We need answers urgently from this cavalier government."