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The next of our new petitions is PE2084, which has been lodged by Randall Graeme Kilgour Foggie. It calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to amend the Burial and Cremation (Scotland) Act 2016 to allow alkaline hydrolysis, accelerated composting and other more eco-friendly methods of disposal of human cadavers. Alkaline hydrolysis, also known as water cremation, is a method of disposal of human remains using hot water with the addition of chemicals. The current legislative framework for burial and cremation allows for the regulation of any new methods of body disposal in the same way that burial and cremation is regulated—how we move from one subject to another in the petitions committee!

The Scottish Government recently consulted on burial inspection, funeral director licensing and alkaline hydrolysis. The consultation sought views on proposals and regulations on all four topics under the Burial and Cremation (Scotland) Act 2016.

The report on the alkaline hydrolysis consultation states that 84 per cent of respondents support the introduction of regulations to allow alkaline hydrolysis, which I understand is practised elsewhere. It concludes that the Scottish Government will now consider the proposals for regulating alkaline hydrolysis in light of the consultation findings and that it will continue to engage with the funeral sector and other interested parties to further inform the development of policy proposals. Do members have any comments or suggestions for action?

Thank you, Mr Torrance. Would anybody else like to come forward with proposals?

My final question relates to the second part of Laura Hansler’s petition, to which you alluded, which is on a national memorial to the many people whose lives have been lost. We had a rather bizarre intervention in our conversation with Transport Scotland, which seemed to think that we were suggesting having a memorial in the middle of the carriageway, with people driving past it, which it said would be a distraction. However, having it there was never the intention. It is to recognise the extensive loss of life and for people to have somewhere to commemorate—as is the case with some other tragedies, albeit that they have been more concentrated. Do you have sympathy with that idea, or can you foresee issues arising from it? If you have sympathy with it, where should the momentum come from?

That is a perfectly reasonable point, and I slightly share your analysis of the way in which these things can drift.

I will now bring in our reporter, Edward Mountain.

Just out of interest, what do you think of the trams now that we have them?

As I said at the start, I will now give you an opportunity to add any final reflections before we draw the meeting to a close.

We will come back to two things that you touched on. One is the proposal in relation to a national memorial, because I realise that, in your lifetime of politics, we have seen memorials to the Piper Alpha disaster and the Lockerbie tragedy. It would be interesting to touch on what might be appropriate—or otherwise—in relation to the loss of life. That is one of the imperatives that drives forward the interest of the committee, and, in fact, it was the original raison d’être for the commitment.

The manifesto commitment from the Scottish National Party at the time did not make particular reference to economic wellbeing or the benefit of potential expansion in the north-east of Scotland. It made particular reference to the fact that dualling could lead to a significant reduction in the loss of life on the route. Was that not a prime motivator in the underpinning of the commitment?

Well, I do not know; I suppose that, arguably, either might be possible. In any event, welcome; I am delighted to have you with us this morning. We will move straight to questions, if that is okay. When we conclude, if we have not touched on anything that you think might be helpful, we would be pleased to hear it.

Let me start with Alex Neil’s evidence. In painting a picture of his meeting with civil servants on the original commitment to the A9, Alex Neil said that one of them kind of looked at him and said that they could be pursuing lots of other projects. Alex Neil replied, saying that the A9 project had one thing that none of those other projects had: “a manifesto commitment”. Indeed, it very much was a manifesto commitment of the Scottish National Party as it went into Government.

What was your commitment to the project, Mr Salmond, and your understanding of the credibility of what was being proposed and the Government’s ability to achieve it?

I will bring in David Torrance next.

First, I listened with interest this morning when you were on “Good Morning Scotland”, being asked questions similar to some of those that we are exploring—

Earlier, I alluded to a couple of supplementary questions, one of which is on oversight. We have talked about the Queensferry crossing. It was motivated by a bill that allowed a committee of Parliament to be intimately involved in the planning of the access route that would be required, including looking at the different types of bridges that might be available and handing to the Government, through the bill process, a project that it was then able to execute on time and on budget and within the lifetime of everybody involved, from those who were involved in the initial decision to do it through to those who cut the red tape, if you like, on the project.

We can reflect on the A9 project. The commitment was first made in 2007 and remains unfulfilled now, in 2024—we are talking about it being completed potentially in 2035. That is a lifetime, several times over, of interested parties and those who were committed to the project coming and going and, potentially, losing sight of the narrative. Your creative suggestion was, in essence, “Bring back Alex Neil and all will be back on track.”

The Government has expressed some interest in the engagement that we have had to date. Therefore, I wonder whether, with your parliamentary experience, it would be possible to find some mechanism whereby there might be consistency of attention on the project from the Parliament, which might help to maintain momentum and focus. Can you think of a mechanism that might assist in ensuring that we do not find that even the work that we are doing here is forgotten about in the course of the next parliamentary session and that, in the parliamentary session after that, people are sitting wondering why we have not delivered the project even by then?