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Roads built by the SNP are UK’s most expensive costing taxpayers nearly £3bn

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Roads built by the SNP are UK’s most expensive costing taxpayers nearly £3bn

The only two roads completed by the SNP Government using the now-ditched Non-Profit Distributing (NPD) model are the most expensive ever to be built in the United Kingdom, the Scottish Daily Express can reveal.

NPD was supposed to replace the infamous Private Finance Initiative (PFI), which saddled taxpayers with decades of payments to cover the cost and ongoing management of new infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and bridges. This was one of the key pledges made by the Nats when they came to power in 2007.




However, critics always warned that NPD was simply a rebranding exercise and it was dropped following an outcry about millions of pounds in public money being funnelled into offshore firms. In 2020, a damning report by Audit Scotland said in some cases it would’ve been up to 50% cheaper simply to borrow the money from the Treasury.

The NPD debt burden stands at £10billion and almost one-third of this relates to just two projects – the M8/M73/M74 motorway improvements and the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route (AWPR). The unitary charge payments are the highest in the UK for any road-building project, even going back to the heyday of PFI under the Tories and New Labour in the 1990s and 2000s.

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The M8/M73/M74 scheme, which was opened in June 2017, has a ‘capital value’ of £310million but over the course of the 30-year contract, Scots taxpayers will pay a colossal £1507.6m. According to Transport Scotland, the scheme saw 12km of new motorway and 10km of new dual carriageway constructed and a further 15km of carriageway upgrades.

With 37km of new or upgraded roads in and around Lanarkshire and the eastern fringes of Glasgow, that works out at a cost of £40.7m per kilometre. Incidentally, the work provided a much easier link to the national motorway network for Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell’s home in the city’s Broomhouse suburb.

Nicola Sturgeon with Keith Brown arriving at Eurocentral for the official opening of the M8, M73 and M74 improvements project

Speaking at the official opening in August 2017, Ms Sturgeon said: “The M8 is a vital link in the central belt and this newly completed section will help connect people to business, leisure and education opportunities and also creates a better environment for companies to do business.”

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