THE Scottish Government's failure to spell out how they are going to pay for the new Forth Road Bridge is predictably causing growing concern.
Before they were elected the SNP were clear the new crossing would be financed through the issue of bonds under their proposed Scottish Futures Trust. But despite the launch of the SFT last month, ministers are now staying tight-lipped about how the
estimated £4 billion bill for the new bridge will be met.
The bonds idea no longer seems a viable option and the Scottish Government does not have the power to issue bonds itself. Although the SNP has talked of councils – which do have such power – combining to fund major projects, there are questions over the legality of local authorities being involved in bond issues for schemes which do not fall within their own remit.
The Government might opt for the "non-profit distributing" funding model, another aspect of the Scottish Futures Trust, which critics claim is really no different from the private finance initiative which the SNP pledged to end.
But the Liberal Democrats are claiming the SNP might even decide to bring back bridge tolls to pay at least part of the cost of the new bridge.
They claim ministers have avoided ruling out tolls altogether by saying only the proposal for funding the bridge will not be "based on tolling".
It would be a major political climbdown, not to say humiliation, if the SNP had to resort to tolls to finance the new bridge when the party made such a big issue of abolishing the charges on the existing crossing.
But the fact is that scrapping the tolls – one of the SNP's first acts in government – was premature in that the revenue from continuing the charges would have helped towards the cost of the new bridge.
Finance Secretary John Swinney has said the funding details for the bridge will be set out "later this year" – but the delay suggests ministers are not clear themselves how they are going to pay for it. And with such a massive engineering project, which the SNP itself has argued is needed urgently, that has to be a worry.
The Government is already in trouble over the estimated £420m cost of its pledge to cut class sizes and, despite promising to continue the school building programme, it has told Edinburgh there will be no more money for new schools.
Alex Salmond and his colleagues are beginning to discover policy pledges are one thing – paying the bills is another.
The full article contains 434 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
