Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am very much aware of that, because I regularly sit in such seats when I travel from Stirling. However, the reality is that, on some of the busiest routes, we still have a nonsensical first class. It is time to look at that again.

An affordable, quality rail service is of use only if people have a station at which to board the train. Many stations that were abandoned in the Beeching era are gone and are not coming back; however, there are still other places within the reach of Scotland’s rail network that would benefit from being reconnected.

For example, in Newburgh, where I was very pleased to join the cabinet secretary on a recent cross-party visit, which I helped the community to host, people have for decades seen train after train go past on the way to Perth and Edinburgh. Children at the local school who dreamed of the railway coming back have now grown up. However, the town is set for major housing growth and the community has its sights set on exciting new opportunities, including the use of the railway and the River Tay together for new ecotourism business. There is a slot in the current railway timetable for a Newburgh rail halt with a low-cost modular station, and that outlay could be recouped easily through increased passenger numbers.

However, Newburgh is not alone, and the demand for more stations is growing. I have been pleased to support four rail campaigns in Fife over the years. One of those—Levenmouth—has now been built; Newburgh is, I hope, on the cusp of a positive decision; and the St Andrews and Dunfermline to Alloa project is waiting for the right moment to progress. Across Scotland, from the north-east to the Borders, communities are developing business cases for new stations. They are building the vision of Scotland’s railways from the bottom up, and they need our support.

Listening to the workers who run our railways is just as important as listening to the communities that they serve. The Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen’s most recent report into the financing of rolling stock reminds us that the job of nationalisation and delivery of a people’s railway is not yet complete. Around a quarter of the cost of every rail ticket goes to servicing rolling stock companies that pay dividends to private shareholders. By issuing Government bonds tied to the investment of proceeds back into rail services, Governments could create a virtuous cycle of investment and reinvestment in a public rail service that we all value and want to grow and develop. ASLEF believes that moving to a public financing model could make 40 per cent savings on rolling stock costs. That is the approach that most of the rest of the world uses to procure new trains.

It is clear that the privatised model has been disastrous. Levels of investment have been far lower than expected, and additional private financial initiatives have been needed to top up investment. Perverse incentives to scrap new electric trains while running older diesel fleets into the ground have been created across the UK. All the while, money is leaking out of the system to foreign owners, while we worry about whether the Scottish Government can justify the relatively small sums to help ScotRail to scrap peak rail fares.

We should be proud of ScotRail, but we should also be listening to passengers, communities and unions about their vision for the next 20 years: a people’s railway for everyone.

I will expand this point first. There has been a shift in that the greatest rail usage is now for leisure travel. The removal of peak rail fares speaks to the post-Covid world that we live in. Yes, there is a need to restore some services, but I do not think that simply going back to the pre-Covid world would be acceptable. I will take the intervention if it is brief.

[Made a request to intervene.]

I join members in thanking the Public Audit Committee. I am not a member of the committee, although I sit on the Scottish Commission for Public Audit. The work that the Auditor General for Scotland has done underlines the importance of Audit Scotland and the AGS. I thank the convener for his powerful comments at the beginning of the debate.

Reading the committee’s report, the word “egregious” springs to mind. At the root of a raft of bad decisions by WICS, there was clearly a lack of focus on its core role as a public body and a deep cultural problem within the organisation. WICS had been encouraged by the Scottish Government to expand its remit into acting as a private sector consultancy on the international stage. Unfortunately, with that came a total indifference to upholding the standards that are required of a public body. There should have been no confusion at all on the part of the chief executive officer, the chair and the board—they should all have known better. The Scottish Government’s arrangements should have worked to rein in excessive and inappropriate spending from day 1, and the Government should have heard the alarm bells ringing far earlier.

The fact that the chief executive officer at the time resigned to avoid scrutiny by the Public Audit Committee is distasteful—that his pay-off cost the taxpayer more than £100,000 even more so. The £70,000 Harvard training courses, funded masters in business administration, £200 dinners and Christmas gifts are all symptoms of an organisation that had lost its sense of responsibility to act in the public interest and deliver value. The whole affair has undermined trust in the regulator and has been damaging to the water industry in Scotland more broadly. However, I am pleased that lessons have now, belatedly, been learned. The organisation has been refocused back on to its public role and will move forward, with further monitoring from the Auditor General.

As Sarah Boyack outlined, now is the time for a renewed focus on the water industry and its regulators. It is 20 years since the Water Environment and Water Services (Scotland) Act 2003 was passed, which established WICS. We are also in the early days of a climate crisis that will be driving huge investment decisions for generations to come. The director general net zero told the committee that WICS provides

“the impetus to deliver on efficiency savings, reduced taxpayer bills and the improvement of the asset”,—[Official Report, Public Audit Committee, 19 February 2025; c 68.]

but there is no fundamental reason why that impetus cannot come directly from Government, with no economic regulator in place. Arguably, WICS helped to bring a focus to Scottish Water in those early days, especially in reducing costs and improving performance. However, is it still fit for purpose? Why cannot that regulatory capacity be built within Government? Other states around the world regulate their nationalised utilities by Governments setting out formal agreements on performance, pricing and other obligations. They manage to focus on improving governance, robust auditing and citizen engagement, without an economic regulator. They manage to get the balance right between the necessary technical decisions and the more political choices.

When WICS was established, at a time when the Scottish Executive was flirting with privatisation, Ross Finnie, the Lib Dem minister, was keen on turning Scottish Water into a mutual, like Welsh Water—public on the outside and private on the inside. In effect, it would have been a public shell company with a business being operated by private contractors. I can see the benefit of an economic regulator in that context, but that is not a model that was ever fit for Scotland. Moreover, the context of the water industry has changed dramatically around the United Kingdom, even in just the past couple of years. With a water bill inevitable in the next session of the Scottish Parliament and further regulatory reforms coming in England, it is time to consider whether WICS is still fit for purpose.

It is a separate issue from the historical bad practice that the Auditor General has reported on, and it should remain so, but there are broader questions about the future of water industry regulation in Scotland, and we should not be afraid to discuss them.

This time last year, the Cabinet Secretary for Transport talked about how flexi and season passes were going to be the way forward and the way to reduce costs. Was there any analysis of how successful that approach was, and did that lead the Government to changing its view and reintroducing off-peak fares all day? I just thought that that was the main answer that the Cabinet Secretary for Transport gave this time last year.

Will the minister give way?

I join members in thanking Bob Doris for securing this very timely debate. It echoes the debate that I led on the same topic in February, but I think that we are now in much happier times on the issue. Alongside my Scottish Green colleagues, rail unions and commuters, I am delighted that peak rail fares are now gone for good.

It has been quite a journey to get here. A six-month pilot that introduced off-peak all-day tickets was secured by the Greens, working with the Government, in 2023. It was extended to nine months before ending a year ago. Now, the scheme is back, and commuters are enjoying those savings once again.

Scrapping peak rail fares is all about making travel cheaper and simpler at a time when many households are still struggling to make ends meet. Peak fares have always been a tax on workers who have no say in what time they travel to work. As pre-Covid work patterns started to return in 2022, the absurdity of spending £30 a day to travel from Edinburgh to Glasgow hit home for many workers. Workers having to spend most of their morning’s wages just to pay for their commute was never right. It was simply not credible to run a nationalised rail service with fares set at extortionate levels. That marginalised rail as an option that was available only for the well paid or for those who, like us in this chamber, are on expenses.

The nine-month pilot got results. It resulted in a nearly 7 per cent increase in passenger numbers and an extra 4 million journeys by rail, half of which would have been otherwise taken by car. With transport accounting for a third of Scottish carbon emissions, it was a win for the climate, too. However, the policy clearly needed time to bed in to convince more people to make the switch.

The magic of the railways is that they shrink Scotland. They make job options viable that would otherwise require people to move house or to sit in spirit-crushing traffic jams for hours on end every day. As a result, they help to keep children in schools in the communities where they are settled. They allow people to choose between having one or two cars—or even no car at all.

However, the power of the railways to shrink Scotland works only if rail is affordable. It takes time for everyone to take stock of a big change such as the scrapping of peak fares and to make choices about where to live and what job to take in the future. It will take time to bed in, but now that certainty has been given that peak rail fares are gone for good, it will enable more people to choose rail as a more attractive option for travel.

It is important that the simple daily savings are understood better so that people can make such choices. Perth to Glasgow is a popular fast commute by train, and it is now £20 cheaper than the old peak price. Stirling to Edinburgh is another really busy commute—it is the one that I take—and the cost of it is down from nearly £20 to about £12 a day.

The introduction last year of better deals on passes was also welcome for those who were prepared to make a commitment to regular travel by rail, but the passes were never a substitute for a cheaper flat fare that meets the demands of a post-Covid world.

I will always remember the queue of people at Queen Street station—I was in that queue—on the day that peak fares were brought back in by the Government. It was chaos. People were confused and angry about having to upgrade tickets because they had missed the off-peak fare by just a few minutes. That is gone now—peak fares are gone. I am pleased that the Government has listened to those passengers, to the rail unions, which have been persistent in their campaigning on the issue, and to the Scottish Greens. We have now ended peak fares for good.

We will be future proofing entry into those markets.

Okay. I think that you are advising decarbonisation in non-residential buildings earlier than in residential buildings. Will you explain that?

I perhaps take a different view, convener. To me, the 6 per cent figure sounds pretty pitiful, to be honest. As someone who lives in a rural area, I could quite easily reduce my mileage by 6 per cent just by organising my day a little bit better, by joining up with other families when taking my kids to activities, for example.

I think that Eoin Devane is making a point about the real reduction coming from urban areas, but in the CCC’s advice, I do not see what the game changer could be if we are to significantly reduce vehicle mileage. For example, some cities in Europe have completely free public transport systems. If that is put in place and funded through congestion charges, could that result in a much greater reduction—say, 30 per cent—in vehicle mileage in urban areas? It could mean that there simply would be no point in driving any more if people are charged to drive but had a completely free, well-funded public transport system.

I feel that we are in a climate emergency. What is the game changer here? Many projects have been tried across Europe, and you have collated some of the best practice on that. However, none of this feels like the big, big shift that is needed. If we are sitting here debating a 6 per cent reduction—or one journey in every 20—that does not really feel to me like a shift in behaviour. I know that I am being provocative, but I am interested in finding out what the big ideas are that could really shift things fairly and in a way that actually benefits people.