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I will begin with a general question. The cycle 1 flood schemes were identified 10 years ago. There were 40 schemes in the plan, the cost of delivering which was estimated to be around £350 million at the time. You now estimate that cost to be around £1 billion, which is a lot of money. Is that your estimate of how much it would cost to deliver the 40 schemes if they were to be delivered in full today, or is that the amount that you understand that the Government has now allocated to their completion? It is a lot of money.

What about contractors? I cannot get my head around how such a large sum of money has not gone on building flood defences or supporting communities. That is my point.

Understood. I am not passing comment on the decision that was made; I simply want to understand the diligence process by which those decisions are made. I know for sure that, if I lived in a community that had been ravaged by a flood, and a defence scheme should have been there but was not, and I then discovered that the local council had diverted money to cover other shortfalls, I would not be an overly happy resident. I am sure that many people are not happy about that.

I point to exhibit 7 in your report, which is a table. It is clear that the Scottish Government is spending significant amounts of money on the issue of flooding, and that that has increased since 2017. In that year, the figure was £42 million, and councils also spent £42 million on the issue. In 2023-24, which is the last year in the table, that figure had increased to £60 million. However, the same graph shows that councils’ expenditure was nearer £80 million, so there is a delta of nearly £20 million there. How did that come about? Do you know whether that shortfall was made up or covered by councils dipping into other parts of their budgets to fund that difference?

Okay, that answers that question—thank you.

My next question is more general; perhaps it is more of an observation that you can respond to. My understanding is that HIE took over the funicular in 2018, using the subsidiary that is here today, but it only fully went into operation in 2025, so seven years passed, although I appreciate that the Covid years were in the middle of that and life was difficult for everyone. Nonetheless, my understanding is that construction was still taking place during the Covid years in many sectors. Why did it take seven years to get it up and running? I find it hard to believe that any other snow-based resort in Europe would have put up with seven years of non-activity.

Mr Gifford, I appreciate that our job is to look backwards, but let us look ahead and talk about some of the positives. Clearly, the issues that you face in the Cairngorms are shared right across Europe. I am sure that you speak to colleagues in the Pyrenees or the Spanish Sierra Nevada, whose resort periods have suffered a similar level of shrinkage due to increased climate challenges. For example, last January, the average temperature in parts of Andorra was 23°C, which is incredibly difficult for a ski resort to manage, for obvious reasons.

How are you underpinning the resort’s long-term future? What are you doing to meaningfully diversify and bring in people and revenue?

Do you offer local residents any discounts, and what are they?

We know of communities that have suffered terribly due to flooding and that are still waiting for Government support. We are talking about £30 million of sunk costs. That is a huge amount of money that could have gone some way towards supporting businesses and households that have really struggled in the past few years. What analysis has been done of where that money actually went? Who did it go to?

Somebody has pocketed the cash somewhere along the line, that is for sure, because £30 million does not disappear overnight.

That was a significant event. To use the parlance, the scheme was designed for one-in-200-year events, but the event in question was worse than that. We cannot control the weather; I understand that point.

I was concerned by what I read in your report about some of the other funding issues. I was most surprised by what we do not know. Although we know in general terms how much the Scottish Government gives to flooding schemes, I was surprised to learn that that money is simply provided via the general capital grant funding model, and that there is no tracking of which councils get how much and what they do with the money. I was equally surprised to learn that the money is not ring fenced in any way, shape or form. Do you have any specific recommendations to make off the back of your findings?

Is there a role for others to play? Councils face a lot of pressures, but there are two examples of flood prevention or flood curing systems in my local area: one is a Scottish Water project for a major A road, which costs £2.5 million; the other is funded by Amey, because it involves constructing wall defences on a coastal road. At the end of the day, it is all public money, but it has filtered its way through different agencies.

Do other parts of the public sector have a bigger role to play? Can they get involved in funding some of the flood prevention work so that there is less reliance on pressured local councils?