HOLYROOD INQUIRY TRANSCRIPT

 

Thursday 6 November 2003 (Morning Session)

 

Rt Hon The Lord Fraser of Carmyllie QC opened the hearing at 10.00 am.

 

1.      Mr John Campbell QC (Counsel for the Inquiry):  Good morning.  Sir, the first witness for the Inquiry today is Mr Alistair Brown.  Mr Brown, good morning and thank you for coming to the Inquiry to assist us.  We are most grateful.

 

2.      Mr Brown:  Thank you.

 

3.      Mr Campbell QC:  Mr Brown, necessarily because of your close involvement in this project from the beginning, this examination may take some time.

 

4.      Mr Brown:  Surely.

 

5.      Mr Campbell QC:  Could I ask you to let me know if you are not comfortable and need a break, please, for any reason.

 

6.      Mr Brown:  Sure.

 

7.      Mr Campbell QC:  I would like to begin by asking you about the extent of your responsibilities, and perhaps take you through an overview of your involvement from the beginning to now, or at least until the building was handed over to the Parliament staff, so that we can get a general picture and then move back into some detail if we may.

 

8.      Can you confirm that you are Alistair Brown, that you have been employed by the Scottish Office, and since 1999, by the Scottish Executive, and you have been there since 1974?

 

9.      Mr Brown:  That is correct.

 

10.  Mr Campbell QC:  Can I ask you to cast your mind back to May 1997?

 

11.  Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

12.  Mr Campbell QC:  Which is where I would like to start.  Clearly, there was a change of administration at that time, and we have heard from Mr Gordon about the formation of the Constitution Group, with four sub-divisions.  I am sure that is all by now quite familiar to you.

 

13.  Were you appointed Director of Administrative Services on 5 May 1997?

 

14.  Mr Brown:  That is correct, yes.

 

15.  Mr Campbell QC:  So where we see DAS in the memos, that is what it means?

 

16.  Mr Brown:  In general it does.  It can also sometimes refer to the Directorate of Administrative Services, which was the group of staff that I was responsible for.

 

17.  Mr Campbell QC:  Can you help us with an outline please of what the responsibilities of the Directorate of Administrative Services was?

 

18.  Mr Brown:  Its core responsibilities all related to administrative services within the Scottish Office, and included accommodation planning and services, information technology, telecommunications, procurement — excluding building and construction procurement — estate services and security.

 

19.  Mr Campbell QC:  You have excepted from that list building and construction procurement.  Where did that responsibility lie?

 

20.  Mr Brown:  That responsibility lay with the Construction and Building Control Group in the Scottish Office Development Department.

 

21.  Mr Campbell QC:  And when they talk about building and construction procurement, that is presumably building and construction procurement for the Scottish Office?

 

22.  Mr Brown:  That is right, yes.

 

23.  Mr Campbell QC:  Was any part of that function devolved away from the Construction and Building Control Group to the Directorate of Administrative Services?

 

24.  Mr Brown:  Not so far as I was aware at the time.

 

25.  Mr Campbell QC:  And to whom did you report at that time, Mr Brown?

 

26.  Mr Brown:  My reporting line was to Muir Russell, who at that time was the Head of the Agriculture, Environment and Fisheries Department.

 

27.  Mr Campbell QC:  And did that change?

 

28.  Mr Brown:  Yes, it changed in April 1998, when Muir Russell was promoted to Head the Scottish Office as its Permanent Secretary on the retirement of Sir Russell Hillhouse, and at that point my reporting line changed from Muir to Robert Gordon, who was of course the Head of the Constitution Group.

 

29.  Mr Campbell QC:  Did you have additional responsibilities as Director of Information Technology?

 

30.  Mr Brown:  That is right.  I had been the Information Technology Director working within the Directorate of Administrative Services for some time, since 1993.  When I was asked to take over the DAS post, the IT post remained vacant until May 1998.  During that period I covered the responsibilities of that post as well.

 

31.  Mr Campbell QC:  It is right to understand that you were involved in the Scottish Parliament building project really from the beginning of the circulation of ideas, is that right?

 

32.  Mr Brown:  Yes, particularly in the site selection aspects of it, but to some extent in other aspects as well.

 

33.  Mr Campbell QC:  Can you say how demanding officials regarded the timetable which was set by Ministers when they took office?

 

34.  Mr Brown:  It was certainly a demanding timetable.  The whole devolution project, if we can call it that, was of course being run to demanding timetables.  There was a demanding timetable for the introduction and passage of the Referendums Bill, and for the production of the White Paper for the referendum itself and then for the introduction of the Scotland Bill, which of course became the Scotland Act.  That was a very clear part of the Government’s policy, and that translated itself obviously into timetables that we as officials had to meet.  We had recognised that they were demanding and we did our best to meet them.

 

35.  Mr Campbell QC:  Where did the expertise lie in the Scottish Office in respect of the provision of accommodation, of any kind?

 

36.  Mr Brown:  You are asking where did the expertise lie within the Scottish Office as a whole?

 

37.  Mr Campbell QC:  Within the Scottish Office, yes.

 

38.  Mr Brown:  There certainly was substantial expertise in my view within my Directorate, within the Administrative Services Directorate, in all matters relating to the accommodation that we in the Scottish Office occupied, and that included expertise in procuring and commissioning a major new building, which the Scottish Office had at that time just occupied in Victoria Quay.

 

39.  Mr Campbell QC:  Yes.

 

40.  Mr Brown:  So there was significant knowledge about how much space office staff needed to work and how much it cost in Edinburgh at that time to build space for office use.

 

41.  The expertise on the construction side and on construction procurement lay, as I have already said, with colleagues in the Construction and Building Control Group, and they too had been involved in that Victoria Quay project that I have referred to.  Dr John Gibbons, for example, who was the Scottish Office’s Chief Architect and the head of that group, Construction and Building Control, had been closely involved in the process of procuring and constructing the Victoria Quay building.  So the expertise in that sense was shared between my staff in DAS and John Gibbons and his colleagues.

 

42.  Mr Campbell QC:  Yes.

 

43.  Mr Brown:  I might add that there was expertise also in other parts of the Directorate, which was relevant to the development of the specification for the Parliament, for example, in relation to IT and telecoms.

 

44.  Mr Campbell QC:  Yes.  I think we will see later on you and your colleagues developed a document called the ‘Building User Brief’, which went through a series of iterations, that is right, isn’t it?

 

45.  Mr Brown:  That is correct, yes.

 

46.  Mr Campbell QC:  I do not want to waste any time on Victoria Quay, but it is right, isn’t it, that Victoria Quay was a building which was developed for you by Forth Ports and constructed by, I think, Trafalgar House?

 

47.  Mr Brown:  I am not absolutely sure of… certainly Forth Ports were the developer.  I do not know about the Trafalgar House point, but Forth Ports were the developer, yes.

 

48.  Mr Campbell QC:  And worked closely with you in the evolution of the Victoria Quay project?

 

49.  Mr Brown:  They worked closely with the Scottish Office team, yes.  I personally was not involved in that.

 

50.  Mr Campbell QC:  Right.  Just as a footnote, do you know what style of construction contract was employed for the construction of Victoria Quay?

 

51.  Mr Brown:  I understand that it was a style called management contracting, but that is something that I have learned subsequently, as it were, and not something that I was an expert on at the time.

 

52.  Mr Campbell QC:  Did you have to do with the work around the Victoria Quay project?

 

53.  Mr Brown:  Only from the point of view of my then job as the IT director for the Scottish Office.  We planned and installed the IT infrastructure.  Of course, to do that we had to know a bit about the building, but it was the physical characteristics of the building rather than its development and construction.

 

54.  Mr Campbell QC:  Now we learnt from Mr Gordon two days ago that the Constitution Group had a series of sub-divisions.

 

55.  Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

56.  Mr Campbell QC:  Did you have to do with the formation of a Scottish Parliament Building Steering Group, which was created quite early on?

 

57.  Mr Brown:  Yes, I did.  The idea of the Scottish Parliament Building Steering Group was that it would provide a forum for senior officials led by Robert, the group was chaired by Robert Gordon, to consider together key issues relating to the Scottish Parliament building project. Clearly at the beginning it was concentrating on issues such as site selection, but then it moved on during 1998 to look at building brief issues and other matters.

 

58.  Mr Campbell QC:  I am just interested to explore with you the lines of command, if you like, for the building project.

 

59.  Was the Scottish Parliament Building Steering Group in effect a group of senior people who were collectively the captain of the ship, as far as the development of the building project was concerned?

 

60.  Mr Brown:  It was certainly the group to which key decisions would be taken.  So I think it would be fair to describe it in the way you have.  I think it was important that Robert Gordon, as head of the Constitution Group, and therefore as the colleague who had the key interactions with Ministers on the whole devolution project, it was important that he chaired the group, and he did that very willingly.

 

61.  Mr Campbell QC:  And was this a group that met often in 1997 and 1998?

 

62.  Mr Brown:  It met twice in 1997, by my recollection, in August and November.  And part of the reason for it not meeting more frequently than that was the sheer pressure of business at that time, and the fact that many decisions were being made directly with Ministers in meetings and so forth.

 

63.  It met more frequently in 1998.  Subject to checking, I think it probably met seven or eight times in 1998 and carried on meeting, at least twice in 1999, before formal responsibility passed over to the Parliament Corporate Body.

 

64.  Mr Campbell QC:  From the last answer, might it be the case that if we look at a series of minutes of the Scottish Parliament Building Steering Group, we will not see an exhaustive audit trail of all the decisions, because it did not actually meet that often?

 

65.  Mr Brown:  You are correct to say that it does not provide an exhaustive audit trail.  I have refreshed my memory of the minutes of the meetings, particularly in 1997, and it is clear that the group was considering key issues.  But one has to look in other places as well.

 

66.  Mr Campbell QC: We have to look between the lines to see other decisions being taken?

 

67.  Mr Brown:  Well, there are certainly many other documents, as the Inquiry knows, that relate to these decisions, and describe the factors that were taken into account in making the decisions.

 

68.  Mr Campbell QC:  Right.  I am keen, and I am sorry if it is a little detailed, but I am just keen to look at the nature of decisions taken by the Steering Group set against the nature of decisions taken by individual senior men and women in the course of the project between meetings of the Steering Group.

 

69.  Mr Brown:  It depended very much on what decisions needed to be made.  It would be fair to say that, very definitely, in the period I am most familiar with, that is up to December 1997, January 1998 and the selection of a site for the Parliament, that really the key decisions were being taken at Ministerial level on the advice of civil servants and in the light of advice by civil servants.

 

70.  Mr Campbell QC:  And so those key decisions having been taken, were then trickled down by means of minutes, or perhaps even by verbal instructions to those such as yourself who had to put them into practice?

 

71.  Mr Brown: That is the case, yes.  And some of these decisions had implications which were then considered in the Parliament Building Steering Group.

 

10.15 am

 

72.  Mr Campbell QC:  I have a picture in my mind, and you must tell me if this is wrong, of Robert Gordon really as the captain of the ship, if I can continue my nautical metaphor, but yourself either as the man on the wheel or perhaps even the man in the engine room.

 

73.  Mr Brown:  I am not sure to what extent these official ways of working lend themselves to the nautical analogy.  Robert certainly was in frequent contact with Mr Dewar and his colleagues, and also with senior civil servants at Whitehall and so on, on a whole range of devolution issues.  We ourselves had direct contact with Ministers.  When I say “we”, I mean people such as John Gibbons and Paul Grice and myself.  We had fairly frequent direct contact with Ministers, in formal meetings, which are, in the main, minuted.  Generally speaking, Robert was present at these and he relied on us to go off and undertake whatever the Secretary of State had asked to be undertaken.

 

74.  Mr Campbell QC:  So the metaphor is perhaps close but not quite —

 

75.  Mr Brown:  Yes.  And I think if I could offer this comment:  it was really Mr Dewar who was the captain of the ship.  We absolutely realised that the devolution project, in political terms, was clearly his.  And, both in theory and in fact, we were there to make sure that what he wanted done was done.  If there were insuperable obstacles or problems with that, it was up to us to come and tell him that and provide advice.

 

76.  Mr Campbell QC:  OK.  We are still really looking at an overview. 

 

77.  Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

78.  Mr Campbell QC:  I am sorry; I have sidetracked a little.

 

79.  Mr Brown:  Absolutely.

 

80.  Mr Campbell QC:  Could I ask you about the process of information gathering.  Clearly, a building user brief is not just something you pick off the shelf.

 

81.  Mr Brown:  No, indeed.

 

82.  Mr Campbell QC:  What was the process undertaken for informing the development of that brief — the gathering of information necessary to make it realistic and something that could be worked to?

 

83.  Mr Brown:  I think it is necessary to understand the context in which the user brief was being developed.  I think the first point to make is that not until Mr Dewar and his colleagues had clearly decided, which was about the middle of June, that they wanted to see a range of site options appraised was it clear to us that we needed to develop a detailed building user brief.  And the reason for that is that, if the rough accommodation proposal made by the Scottish Constitutional Convention of the Parliament meeting in the Old Royal High School and MSPs having their offices and so on in St Andrew’s House had been pursued, then the Parliament would, in a sense, have had to adapt itself to the available accommodation because these were Grade A, Category A listed buildings and they were not going to be knocked about a great deal.  So the critical issue of the building user brief would have had much less prominence.

 

84.  Once it became clear in about the middle of June that Mr Dewar and his colleagues wanted a wider range of options appraised, then one of the first tasks that we undertook, and it was led off by my colleague Barbara Doig, who was the Head of the Accommodation Division at that time, we began to gather information along the lines that you suggest.  I think the first such meeting — if I can just refer to my notes here, I can be clear about that — there is a note in my papers from Barbara Doig dated 18 June 1997 saying that this process had begun.  In a fairly informal way, people were beginning to think what the requirements of the Parliament would be in terms of numbers of staff, the size of the debating chamber — very broadly, obviously, at that stage — the need for public access, the size of public galleries, the needs of the media and all these factors.

 

85.  So as early as 18 June we were beginning to put together lists of factors that would have to be drawn together.  Later on, into the autumn, and I am not sure if I could give you a precise date here, but we certainly began with a view — and it was no more than an early view at that stage; it could be no more than an early view — that the requirements of the building would be about 12,000 square metres of usable space.  The building brief was developed as our understanding of the functioning of the Parliament began to form.  By November 1997 we were clear that what would be required would be a building with about 16,000 square metres of usable space.

 

86.  Mr Campbell QC:  OK.

 

87.  Mr Brown:  But, as I am sure the Inquiry has heard already, the building user brief, it continued to develop as more information was gathered in about the functioning and nature of the Parliament.  In particular, it was a matter that was considered by the Consultative Steering Group, which was set up in January 1998 and which Mr McLeish chaired.  And I recall that one of the issues that that group considered was the building user brief.  I hope that is helpful.

 

88.  Mr Campbell QC:  Thank you.  That is helpful.  Can you look at… no, I think we will just continue with this overview for the moment if we may, and come back to the documents, because it is helpful to get this wider picture.

 

89.  How early was it that you took on board the help of an experienced project manager to look at how a project might be controlled and managed?

 

90.  Mr Brown:  Now, in speaking about the experienced project manager, I take it you are referring to Mr Bill Armstrong?

 

91.  Mr Campbell QC:  Yes, indeed.  Although “experienced” is your word, not mine.  I just —

 

92.  Mr Brown:  Yes.  Absolutely.  No, Bill Armstrong was an experienced project manager.  I was not personally involved in engaging Bill Armstrong, and I cannot now tell you on what date the Scottish Office did engage his services.  But by my recollection, it was certainly early on, and I would have thought by July 1997 he was on board.  I might be wrong by a month either way but not materially.

 

93.  Mr Campbell QC:  And did Mr Armstrong then have input into developing the building user brief?

 

94.  Mr Brown:  He did, yes.  I would say that it was one of his main tasks during 1997.  In doing so, he was obviously very much assisted by colleagues across the Scottish Office and particularly in Constitution Group.  And in terms of the administrative support for the task of pulling the user brief together, Constitution Group colleagues, there was a branch team leader called Stewart Gilfillan who took a key role in supporting the process of getting the project brief together.

 

95.  Just as an example of the kind of thing that was being done in September — and no doubt at other times, but certainly the events in September are recorded and remain in my mind.  Stewart Gilfillan was asking Mr Dewar and Mr McLeish a series of questions relating to the building brief and building these in.

 

96.  Mr Campbell QC:  And the process of information gathering would be done by other colleagues, either in Accommodation or in the Building Group itself?

 

97.  Mr Brown:  Yes.  They all contributed.  The key role that Constitution Group played was that they were closest to the thinking of how the Parliament would actually operate.

 

98.  Mr Campbell QC:  And would obviously reflect closely Ministers’ own thinking on that subject?

 

99.  Mr Brown:  That is correct.  Yes, that is absolutely right.

 

100.          Mr Campbell QC:  But without, it has to be said, any empirical experience of having done it before in relation to a Parliament.

 

101.          Mr Brown:  Yes, that is true.  As a guide to how the new Scottish Parliament might operate, we did, from time to time, look at Westminster.  But the feeling, quite honestly, about that was that it was not a particularly good guide that part of the thinking behind the devolution project was that the Scottish Parliament would operate in a rather different way from the Parliament at Westminster.

 

102.          Mr Campbell QC:  Did the same groups or divisions carry forward the process of ultimately commissioning design feasibility studies, running the designer competition and taking the matter forward in that way?

 

103.          Mr Brown: Yes.  The groups of Scottish Office staff that we have mentioned already were certainly involved in commissioning the design feasibility studies, and in other aspects of the project.  However, by September, certainly into October, the Scottish Office was being assisted by a number of commissioned external experts.

 

104.          Mr Campbell QC:  External advisers? 

 

105.          Mr Brown:  Advisers.  Exactly.

 

106.          Mr Campbell QC:  Just again, focusing on the lines of responsibility, those all draw back into Administrative Services, and therefore to Mr Gordon and thence to Ministers.

 

107.          Mr Brown:  Yes, that is right, although one observation I would make is that the Project Team — with Barbara Doig and Bill Armstrong as key members of it — had direct input and very, very regular interaction both with myself on the Administrative Services side and with John Gibbons and his colleagues on the Construction and Building Control side.  So it is right to say that the formal line management reporting line for the Project Team leader, Barbara Doig, was to me.  That was the relationship — I was Barbara’s line manager.

 

108.          It is necessary to keep in mind that, on very important technical issues, the Construction and Building Control Group colleagues made a direct input.

 

109.          Mr Campbell QC:  Thank you.  I will bear that in mind.  You say you were Barbara Doig’s line manager? 

 

110.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

111.          Mr Campbell QC:  Do you know that Barbara Doig was later appointed as the project sponsor?

 

112.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  That occurred, I think, formally in April 1998.

 

113.          Mr Campbell QC:  Quite a bit later.

 

114.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

115.          Mr Campbell QC:  Again, as a footnote, but we may come back to it, I have so far failed to understand the expression “project sponsor”.

 

116.          Mr Brown:  It derives from then current and, as far as I know, probably still current Treasury guidance on the appropriate approach to public sector building procurement.

 

117.          Mr Campbell QC:  That is guidance which we can find in publicly issued Treasury documents?

 

118.          Mr Brown:  Absolutely, yes.  It may be out of date now but it was certainly in currency at that time.

 

119.          Mr Campbell QC:  So to achieve an understanding of what at least the guidelines mean by “project sponsor”, we should look there?

 

120.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  The titles used in that Treasury guidance were “project sponsor” and “project owner”.

 

121.          Mr Campbell QC:  Other key colleagues in this process were, I think, Mr Anthony Andrew?

 

122.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

123.          Mr Campbell QC:  What were his understood responsibilities?

 

124.          Mr Brown:  Anthony was the Chief Estates Surveyor in the Scottish Office and was Head of Estates Services, and he had a range of responsibilities there to do, normally within the Scottish Office, giving advice on property values and property market issues, all relating to accommodation for public services in Scotland. 

 

125.          In relation to the Parliament building project, Anthony played a key role with me in the site selection efforts.

 

126.          Mr Campbell QC:  OK, thank you.

 

127.          Mr Brown:  Also, after a site had been selected, in concluding the purchase of the site, and the conditions that attach to that, with help from legal colleagues.

 

128.          Mr Campbell QC:  We have heard elsewhere that, within the Scottish Office at this time, there was a Procurement Division.  And, indeed, you have mentioned it in your opening remarks.

 

129.          Mr Brown:  Yes, indeed.

 

130.          Mr Campbell QC:  It is so far a puzzle to me — but you may be able to help me — as to why the Procurement Division does not appear to have been more intimately involved in the procurement of a new building.

 

131.          Mr Brown:  The Procurement Division, as I said at the beginning, was one of the divisions within the Directorate of Administrative Services that reported to me.  At that time in the Scottish Office’s organisation, the responsibilities of that division extended broadly but did not include building and construction procurement.  These responsibilities lay with the Construction and Building Control Group. 

 

132.          That, I might add if it is of interest to the Inquiry, is something that has changed since then.

 

133.          Mr Campbell QC:  So at that time, leaving aside all the issues about this Parliament, if you had been looking to procure a new building, that would not be the first port of call?  If you are looking for 100 photocopiers, that is where you go?

 

134.          Mr Brown:  In 1997, that was absolutely right, yes.

 

135.          Mr Campbell QC:  OK.  And did you work, finally, on the Scottish Parliament project until the handover to the Parliament in 1999?

 

136.          Mr Brown: My direct involvement with the project ceased altogether in December 1998–January 1999, when Barbara Doig’s line management transferred across to Constitution Group.

 

10.30 am

 

137.          Mr Campbell QC: And she became, as it were, directly reporting to… ?

 

138.          Mr Brown: To Robert Gordon —

 

139.          Mr Campbell QC: To Mr Gordon.

 

140.          Mr Brown: — as Head of Constitution Group. My involvement, obviously, lasted from May 1997, therefore, to December 1998. As we have already noted, during 1997 I was very heavily involved in the site selection process. During 1998 I had a lot to do with the selection of an interim location for the Parliament, and then with the specification, procurement and commissioning of services for the Parliament.

 

141.          Mr Campbell QC: For the temporary home?

 

142.          Mr Brown: For the interim home, yes.

 

143.          Mr Campbell QC: For the temporary home on the Mound?

 

144.          Mr Brown: That is right, yes. Just as an example of the kind of thing that we were doing: I was asked to chair Parliament Informatics Group, “informatics” being a sort of fancy word for “information technology”. We had a range of experts from around Scotland, and our job then was to develop bright ideas for how IT might be used innovatively in the new Parliament —

 

145.          Mr Campbell QC: In the new Parliament?

 

146.          Mr Brown: — in its interim home.

 

147.          Mr Campbell QC: Now, Mr Brown, can I pause there and reel back a little. Think, will you, please, about the contents of the White Paper and the costs which are demonstrated there. If I gallop through this, forgive me, because we have heard quite a lot about it already. But I would like you to look, please, as a starting point, at SE/1/011, which will appear in a minute on the screen. While that is being retrieved, I can tell you that it is an Annex appearing in an early draft of the White Paper, as part of what was then Chapter 13, and headed “Costs”. Can you confirm that this White Paper went through a very large number of drafts very quickly?

 

148.          Mr Brown: Certainly my recollection is that it did, yes.

 

149.          Mr Campbell QC: If we look at this Annex, we can see, first of all, in the bottom left that it is dated 6 June; secondly, that it breaks down prospective costs as between a Parliament building, offices, staff offices, offices for the Executive, displaced from St Andrew’s House, and offices for the staff of the Secretary of State. It brings out a range of figures between £24·5 million and £34 million.

 

150.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

151.          Mr Campbell QC: Can you help us with an idea of what the source of those — I accept the draft and I accept they are only indicative — but what was the source of them at the time?

 

152.          Mr Brown: The figures that are on this document in front of us?

 

153.          Mr Campbell QC: Yes.

 

154.          Mr Brown: Yes. They would come from more than one source, because the first row of the table relates to Parliament building, and then the notes make clear that that relates to New Parliament House, which is referred to in other documents as the Old Royal High School. The issue of purchase and then of refurbishment and conversion of the Grade A listed building: now my impression is that these costs would have come either direct from City of Edinburgh Council, who owned the building and had quite a lot of information about its internal and external condition, or from work that we had done very early in the process with City of Edinburgh Council, to arrive at an estimate of the costs of refurbishing and converting it.

 

155.          Mr Campbell QC: By “early in the process”, do you mean before or after the election?

 

156.          Mr Brown: It is possible — although I do not have accurate knowledge of this — that we had started to do prudent things immediately before the election, including getting an idea of the costs of refurbishing and converting that building.

 

157.          Mr Campbell QC: There is a period of purdah, is there not, for four or five weeks before an election?

 

158.          Mr Brown: There is a conventional understanding, I think, in Government and between parties, that immediately before an election, officials are able to undertake some work with the agreement of the outgoing Administration on these kinds of issues.

 

159.          Mr Campbell QC: Is it fair to summarise this document thus? The figures shown there were probably derived from a number of sources, which may have included the City of Edinburgh Council and work done by your own staff?

 

160.          Mr Brown: Yes, I think that would be an accurate description. Just for completeness, I should say that costs relating to any changes to St Andrew’s House — and I think that that would come in the line headed “Offices for MSPs and Support Staff”, where the range of costs is given as £8 million to £12 million — would have been provided by staff of the Directorate of Administrative Services. On the basis of quite a lot of work that had been done in 1995 and 1996, by my recollection, really on the problem of what was to be done with St Andrew’s House, which was, as you know, a 60-year-old building, Grade A listed, and needing a bit of renovation.

 

161.          Mr Campbell QC: I think there was a parallel programme, was there not, at this time for that renovation of St Andrew’s House?

 

162.          Mr Brown: There had been planning work done, and a number of options had been presented to the previous Administration. A decision had been made to go for minimal repairs to St Andrew’s House to maintain it in a safe condition. Money had been set aside in Scottish Office estimates for that purpose. But no start had been made on the work by May 1997.

 

163.          Mr Campbell QC: We know that the Secretary of State visited the Old Royal High School on 30 May.

 

164.          Mr Brown: The 30th?

 

165.          Mr Campbell QC: 30 May. We know he was not impressed as to its potential for a Parliament building, and we know that at or about that time he instructed consideration of additional options.

 

166.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

167.          Mr Campbell QC: Were you part of those discussions?

 

168.          Mr Brown: Yes. I had provided some advice to the Secretary of State on 20 May in a note from myself to Mr McLeish and Mr Dewar. As you say, after that, on 30 May, Mr Dewar visited the Old Royal High School site. His Private Secretary, Mr Lugton, in a minute of 2 June, effectively commissioned further work to be done. To quote what was said at that stage — this is 2 June:

 

169.  “Mr Dewar said that Ministers would find it helpful to have a paper appraising various alternatives, including the Old Royal High School site and a location in Leith near Victoria Quay.”

 

170.          Mr Campbell QC: Did you provide that paper quite shortly thereafter?

 

171.          Mr Brown: Yes we did. We provided a bit of interim, preliminary advice on 6 June — and we can go further into that, if you would wish. Again, on 12 June, I put forward a submission to Ministers.

 

172.          Mr Campbell QC: Was that worked up, essentially, by yourself?

 

173.          Mr Brown: I co-ordinated it, and I certainly take responsibility for what it says, but much of the input would have been provided by other colleagues. Then I would have discussed that with them. The way we tended to do these things would be for me to dictate an outline draft covering the issues that I believed needed to be set out for the Secretary of State. Then colleagues would fill in the framework.

 

174.          Mr Campbell QC: So the submission, or the minute, in draft would circulate among colleagues before going through Mr Gordon to the Secretary of State?

 

175.          Mr Brown: Well, two points there. These minutes — and obviously there is a whole series of them between May and December 1997 — the general approach was to do as you say, sometimes to circulate several times in a single day a draft minute gathering colleagues’ comments. My impression is that it would certainly have been good practice to do that on every occasion, and I am sure that we managed to do that.

 

176.          Your second point was that these went through Mr Gordon. Normally, Robert Gordon would have seen a draft of the minute before it went forward, but I did not clear the text of my advice before it went to Ministers. That was directly from myself to the Ministers’ Private Offices.

 

177.          Mr Campbell QC: Could we look, please, at SE/1/021, which for your notes is dated 16 June. Can we see that you are the author of this?

 

178.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

179.          Mr Campbell QC: The Secretary of State is the immediate addressee and Mr McLeish, the Under-Secretary, the Agriculture, Environment and Fisheries Department, and other members of the Constitution Group, and then the Special Advisers are all included in the circulation. It records a meeting on 13 June, and in paragraph 2 it discusses the options. I wonder if you could discuss these options with us, just briefly, to highlight what you were thinking about at that time? I do not want to spend too much time on this, Mr Brown, so do your best to summarise it.

 

180.          Mr Brown: I will try to be brief. These options were set out in the notes of the 6th and the 12th — just let me check that that is correct.

 

181.          Mr Campbell QC: I will take that from you.

 

182.          Mr Brown: 6 and 12 June. The purpose of that very early minuting was to see if Ministers were interested in particular options that could possibly have been taken forward within buildings or on land which the Scottish Office either owned or controlled.

 

183.          The two options in question were: using St Andrew’s House as the Parliament’s building, probably involving constructing a debating chamber in the internal courtyard, or something like that; and secondly, constructing a debating chamber adjacent to the Victoria Quay building in Leith. Why these two options were laid out and exposed to Ministers to get their reaction was that, if they had been very attracted to either of these, our view was that they could have selected one or other of these options, because it involved land and buildings that were in our ownership or our control. Had they been attracted to that, then our view was that it would have been possible for them to have selected these options without further detailed option appraisal work.

 

184.          One of the points that we were making in our advice was that if we get into detailed option appraisal work on greenfield sites, then that will take time. And effectively what the meeting of 13 June, which is recorded in my minute of 16 June, did was to give the Secretary of State the opportunity to say no, he did not want to jump at one of these options; he wanted a fuller option appraisal conducted, including an appraisal of greenfield sites.

 

185.          Mr Campbell QC: OK. So this minute we are looking at effectively comes after the more detailed discussion in your minute of 12 June?

 

186.          Mr Brown: Yes. It reports the discussion at the meeting with the Secretary of State, where we considered the advice of 6 and 12 June. Indeed, a general point to make to the Inquiry is that in almost every case, these — looking back on it, very long and detailed minutes I seem to have been putting up to the Secretary of State — almost invariably they led to a discussion, or they were prepared and offered in advance of a discussion with Ministers.

 

187.          Mr Campbell QC: By “discussion”, you mean an actual discussion, not a discussion on paper?

 

188.          Mr Brown: An actual discussion.

 

189.          Mr Campbell QC: An actual discussion, right.

 

190.          Mr Brown: And in most cases that discussion is minuted, and one is able to see how the advice was considered.

 

191.          Lord Fraser: In this minute you refer to an option 2, which was the construction — well, you do not, but there is a reference — of a debating chamber within St Andrew’s House, possibly in the internal courtyard. And that appears from this minute to have been an option to be discarded, if we look to the last line of that paragraph 2. Am I right in understanding that consideration of the use of St Andrew’s House continued after this date?

 

192.          Mr Brown: Yes. The use of St Andrew’s House did continue as part of a Regent Road option. The precise details of that option changed over time. At this point in time we were looking at a number of possibilities, including the use of the two buildings — the Old Royal High School and St Andrew’s House. A little later on you will find reference to the possibility of constructing a debating chamber in the middle of Regent Road, which clearly involved the stopping up of Regent Road. And finally, when we get to the architectural design feasibility studies, between October and December, of course Page & Park, who had been asked to produce design ideas for St Andrew’s House, went back to this, and their outline architectural scheme showed a debating chamber to the south-east — actually, in what is now a car park — of St Andrew’s House.

 

193.          Lord Fraser: Yes. Thank you.

 

194.          Mr Campbell QC: You have referred several times to the minute of 12 June. I would like to get it into the record. Could you look at SE/2/092, please. That is the minute there, I think.

 

195.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

196.          Mr Campbell QC:  This note, you say:

 

197.  “discusses further the relative merits of the various options in the light of additional information.”

 

198.          And you draw Ministers’ attention to:

 

199.  “Finance Group colleagues’ advice on the related finance issues contained in paragraphs 23 to 27.”

 

200.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

10.45 am

 

201.          Mr Campbell QC:  You then go on to talk about timing, which you highlight as a difficult issue, even at that stage.  If we turn the page, please, to SE/2/093, we see that Annex A summarises the start-up costs for the buildings.  You make assumptions about accommodation for staff, both in respect of the Parliament and also in respect of moving staff, and then you begin to look at the various options.

 

202.          Option 1 is set out there, and, just before we leave it, you estimate costs at between £19 million and £25 million.

 

203.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

204.          Mr Campbell QC:  Together with £10 million to £12·5 million for rehousing staff?

 

205.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

206.          Mr Campbell QC:  You make an assumption in paragraph 5 that there could be some accommodation-sharing with Executive staff, and you look in paragraph 7 at likely availability from spring 1999, with MSPs offices in spring 2000 —

 

207.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

208.          Mr Campbell QC:  Carefully noting in brackets that there would be no delays due to listed building consents or physical difficulties.  In page SE/2/094 you look at St Andrew’s House entirely.

 

209.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

210.          Mr Campbell QC:  I do not want to take you through the detail of that, but can we note that, again, a range of costs is given of £17 million to £21 million? And then, if you look at option 3, in paragraph 10, which we call the greenfield option.

 

211.          Did you have in mind, Mr Brown, at that time, land under the control of the Scottish Office, adjacent to Victoria Quay, as distinct from land under the control of the Forth Ports Authority, as they then were?

 

212.          Mr Brown:  I do not think we had made any explicit assumption at that point.  We knew from the fact that we were occupying a building in Leith that there was a substantial amount of land available.  We did have an option over some land that was adjacent to Victoria Quay, but the option that is described here as option 3 — ‘New building housing Chamber and MSPs’ offices — was not specific to any particular land at this stage.

 

213.          Mr Campbell QC:  It is fair to recognise, is it not, that Forth Ports Authority were pretty quick off the starting blocks in representing to you that Leith might be a good option?

 

214.          Mr Brown:  My recollection is certainly that they were very interested in the issue as soon as it became public knowledge that the Parliament was not automatically going to be located in the Old Royal High School.

 

215.          Mr Campbell QC:  And then we have, scrolling down, option 4, which you describe as

 

216.  “a new debating chamber and service areas on a site near Victoria Quay.”

 

217.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

218.          Mr Campbell QC:  This is an option, is it, which would also have required a new build?  I would just like to be clear.

 

219.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

220.          Mr Campbell QC:  I would just like to be clear about the distinction between option 3 and option 4 in this minute.

 

221.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  Option 4, as we described it here, was really a minimal addition to the 33,000 square metre building at Victoria Quay, and the addition would be the debating chamber, and probably committee rooms.  I think that was probably what was in our minds at that time — the accommodation that was distinctive to the Parliament, and that the MSPs would need to do their collective business.

 

222.          The attraction of option 4 was that the civil servants would vacate some proportion of the western end of Victoria Quay, squeeze up a bit, and provide accommodation that was already built for use of MSPs.

 

223.          Mr Campbell QC:  But there is recognition here, is there not, that there would be substantial staff decanting problems associated with that?

 

224.          Mr Brown:  Well, we would have had to rehouse, as it says, some of the Scottish Executive staff from Victoria Quay, yes.

 

225.          Mr Campbell QC:  And you go on to say, on page SE/2/095, I think, that there is a risk of having to use temporary accommodation, and double — and possibly triple — moves, which obviously adds to the cost.

 

226.          Mr Brown:  Yes, that would have been an issue, and the discussion in paragraphs 15 to 22 of the minute that you have before you attempts to tease out the broad issues that, in our view, were associated with these different options.

 

227.          Mr Campbell QC:  Right.  I would like to look at paragraph 20 please.  You say there are four factors, other than cost, differentiating options 2 and 3: timetable risks associated with the St Andrew’s House option; second, St Andrew’s House is central, and I am not quite sure that I understand why that was of significance.

 

228.          Mr Brown:  The centrality issue?

 

229.          Mr Campbell QC:  Yes.

 

230.          Mr Brown:  Well, at this stage, we were very early in developing site selection criteria, so I cannot point you, at this point, to site selection criteria, but a pretty obvious — I would suggest, anyway — an obvious implicit criterion is accessibility to the public and, I think, centrality is a kind of proxy for accessibility here.

 

231.          Mr Campbell QC:  And was that a theme that remained pretty constant right through to site selection?

 

232.          Mr Brown:  It was always a criterion in the site selection, but it certainly did not stop, as you know, extremely serious consideration being given to a site at Leith, which, by any measure, was not central.

 

233.          Mr Campbell QC:  But insofar as you had to, as the senior officer, reflect the Secretary of State’s thinking, am I correct in understanding that centrality, which is the word you used, perhaps we should call it central accessibility —

 

234.          Mr Brown:  That is better.

 

235.          Mr Campbell QC:  — was an important feature for him?

 

236.          Mr Brown:  It was one of the criteria that he wanted to take into account, and therefore one of the aspects that we were obliged to assess.  Mr Dewar was not saying that the building has to be central, or that it has to be centrally accessible.  I think that was borne out by the fact that he specifically asked us to assess the pros and cons of a site at Leith.  But it might shed a little light on the point that you are highlighting there to say that he did tell us not to assess sites at Edinburgh Park because he felt that — that is the western extremity of the city, towards the airport — because he felt that that was too far from Edinburgh; too far from the centre.  However, he felt that Leith was not too far, and he wanted us to continue to assess possibilities there.

 

237.          Mr Campbell QC:  So, quite reasonably, accessibility was one of his criteria?

 

238.          Mr Brown: Absolutely, yes.

 

239.          Mr Campbell QC:  I said I would try and go through this quickly, and I am failing to do that, but can I ask you to look at page SE/2/099, just to try and summarise this document?  Here there is a table which is attached to your minute of the 12 June.  And here you set out in tabular form the options you have been discussing in the paper.  Is that right?

 

240.          Mr Brown:  Yes indeed.

 

241.          Mr Campbell QC:  Can we look at the indicative costs shown there?  We can see in each case a range is given, the range is explained, and there are a series of footnotes.  So, with your permission, I am not going to take you through the detail of all that.  Can I just be clear, Mr Brown, please, where was all this financial information coming from?

 

242.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  The financial information in the Annex would come from slightly different sources, depending on which column it is in; which option it relates to.  We have already discussed briefly where information about the cost associated with the Old Royal High School would come from — there is a purchase cost, the refurbishment cost, and so on.

 

243.          The costs relating to option 2, St Andrew’s House, would have come largely from my colleagues in the Accommodation Division, who knew how much it would cost to carry out essential work to St Andrew’s House.  In addition, there is an estimate here of £7 million for a chamber, and £2 million for a service area fit-out.

 

244.          These were obviously very early estimates and, as the covering submission — the words in the submission — say they are very “broad brush”.  I would expect that these costs would have come from colleagues in Construction and Building Control Group, from the quantity surveyors there.  New build at Leith — the estimate of £35 million to £40 million — which, of course, found an echo in the White Paper, was an estimated cost drawn up by Construction and Building Control Group.  And I would deduce that the cost of option 4, that is the building of a debating chamber near to Victoria Quay, would also have been drawn up by Construction and Building Control Group.  I am practically certain that that is right.

 

245.          Lord Fraser:  When the White Paper eventually emerged, the range of costings went from £10 million to £40 million.  Well, the only £10 million I have ever managed to discover is the top cost of the refurbishment of the chamber within the Old Royal High School.  It is abundantly clear from all your work at this time, Mr Brown, that you correctly understood that, if you are going to have a working Parliament, you have got to have accommodation for the MSPs.

 

246.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

247.          Lord Fraser:  And, under that option 1, you would put in quite a substantial figure for St Andrew’s House.

 

248.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

249.          Lord Fraser:  Should not the range in the White Paper, then, have been not just the refurbishment of the Chamber, but what was necessary ancillary accommodation for MSPs and their staff?

 

250.          Mr Brown:  What you say is right, however, I can offer an observation which might be helpful to the Inquiry on this issue of the range of figures of £10 million to £40 million.  I have to make clear that this is informed speculation on my part, but, in the discussion of Parliament accommodation options in the period leading up to the finalising of the drafting of the White Paper, there was a bit of discussion about innovative financial solutions — call it PFI, if you like.  And there is a minute, if it would be helpful to the Inquiry, it was dated 27 June, from Michael Lugton, the Secretary of State’s Private Secretary, to Paul Grice.  And if I were to quote a section, it might shed some light on the point that you raise, Lord Fraser.

 

251.          Mr Campbell QC:  Can we just get it on the screen?  SE/1/028, please.  Thank you.

 

252.          Mr Brown:  It is in paragraph 3 of that note, which records a discussion with the Secretary of State on 27 June.  And in paragraph 3, about two thirds of the way down, there is a sentence saying:

 

253.  “Ms Alexander suggested that the potential range…”

 

254.          and the range in question is a range of figures to be used in the White Paper:

 

255.  “might be very wide, if consideration was given to use of a private developer, who would derive an income stream in consequence of putting up the capital.”

 

256.          I would suggest to the Inquiry that that may have been part of the thinking behind the source of the wider range of £10 million to £40 million.  In other words, the £10 million was whatever incidental one-off costs would have been associated with establishing a Parliament in a building which was provided by a developer, and leased or rented, or some such arrangement.

 

257.          Lord Fraser:  But if you go on, Mr Brown, the then Under-Secretary of State, Sir Russell Hillhouse I take it at this time, is it?

 

258.          Mr Brown:  That is correct.

 

259.          Lord Fraser:  He thought that:

 

260.  “It would be necessary to make it clear in textual form in the White Paper that this was one of the options, if in fact it was a serious runner.”

 

261.          I do not recollect that in the White Paper that £10 million figure is said might be achievable if we use some innovative financing arrangement. Sir Russell Hillhouse is raising a point of concern.

 

262.          Mr Brown:  I cannot comment on that, Lord Fraser.  Although I saw successive drafts of the White Paper, I was not directly involved in the drafting of it.

 

263.          Mr Campbell QC:  Mr Lugton says also in the last line of this page:

 

264.  “The Secretary of State invited you…”

 

265.          that is Mr Grice:

 

266.  “to put forward a draft form of words to consider.  This should cover not only this issue, but should list in narrative form the elements of the costs which would have been itemised in Annex C.”

 

267.          I take it that is a reference back to Annex C in the draft White Paper?

 

268.          Mr Brown:  Sorry, yes, I believe so.  There was an Annex C at one point, as I recall. There was discussion about whether to retain it.

 

269.          Mr Campbell QC:  Which was a successor to the one I showed you earlier, SE/1/011, I think?

 

270.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

271.          Mr Campbell QC:  Well, in the result, Mr Brown, the Annexes disappeared, against the background of a suggestion that to include them might give an impression of spurious accuracy, which is an expression we see in some of the minutes.  And, in the White Paper, we have a range of £10 million to £40 million for a new building, and there is a passing reference to forms of funding being considered.

 

272.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

273.          Mr Campbell QC:  As well as other options aside from the Royal High School.

 

274.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

275.          Mr Campbell QC:  That is right, is it not?

 

276.          Mr Brown:  I do not have the text of the White Paper with me, but I am sure that is right —

 

277.          Mr Campbell QC:  I am trying to, as I say, move on a bit, and summarise that.

 

278.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  Sure.  What you say is helpful, and that reference to the innovative financing solutions may be the form of words that Sir Russell Hillhouse suggested in the passage in paragraph 3 that Lord Fraser drew attention to.

 

279.          Mr Campbell QC:  Yes.

 

280.          Mr Brown:  In which case, his suggestion would appear to have been reflected, at least to some extent, in the final text of the White Paper.

 

11.00 am

 

281.          Mr Campbell QC:  Could I ask you if you have a recollection as to how significant it was to the collective thinking at the time of publication of the White Paper that any indication of likely costs was reasonably robust?

 

282.          Mr Brown:  I do not have a clear personal recollection of the process that we went through in drafting the White Paper, but I think I am absolutely safe in inferring that colleagues would have been concerned to reflect accurately the costs that we knew about at that time, bearing in mind that it was a very early stage in the development of thinking and of options. 

 

283.          Mr Campbell QC:  It has been suggested elsewhere that the £10 million to £40 million range which appeared in the White Paper all reflected the thinking that these were figures for what was described by one witness as “a bog-standard new building” — that is in fact an oversimplification, is it not?

 

284.          Mr Brown:  Well, we discussed where the £10 million might have come from, but if we can think about the £40 million, then that was the top end of the range of £35 million to £40 million for a new build.  The submissions of 6 June and 12 June, which I put together and put forward to the Secretary of State, talk in terms, and make clear, that the cost estimate relates to a building of about 120,000 square feet, which in layman’s terms, I think, comes to approximately 12,000 square metres, and also that it relates to a building that is a reasonably simple building in architectural terms — both of these are quotations from the submission of 6 June — I would not describe that as bog standard.

 

285.          From what I recall of the costing bases that were used by Construction and Building Control Group colleagues arriving at that cost of £35 million to £40 million, they used High Court building standards for the public areas of the building, and office standards for the rest of it, for example, MSPs’ offices and so on.  And High Court standards would be the most expensive line on the quantity surveyor’s ready reckoner, cost reckoner, as far as public service building went in Scotland.

 

286.          Mr Campbell QC:  I must say, if you ever worked in the High Court, Mr Brown, you might not agree with that immediately.  However, we are looking at an assumed standard at the top line for accommodation?

 

287.          Mr Brown:  For the public areas; for the debating chamber and, I would think, the Committee rooms.  When a quantity surveyor is asked to cost this kind of thing, they look at a ready reckoner that tells them how many thousands of pounds per square metre to allow, and my recollection is that the premium for High Court standard would be something like twice normal office standard.

 

288.          Mr Campbell QC:  Did the Secretary of State indicate to you in mid-June, whether he was at all attracted by the idea of a debating chamber in St Andrew’s House?

 

289.          Mr Brown:  Well, there is a note of the meeting, if I can find it.

 

290.          Mr Campbell QC:  I think it is 18 June.

 

291.          Mr Brown:  18 June.  Yes.  The meeting took place on the 13^th, and my note to the Secretary of State’s Private Secretary is dated the 16^th.  This records — and I think Lord Fraser has already drawn attention to — the apparent anomaly, as it were, regards option 2; construction of a debating chamber within St Andrew’s House — the Secretary of State considered that space for a debating chamber would be very constrained, and it would be difficult to use space in the rest of the building efficiently.  Furthermore, the Parliament would have no visible presence, being literally out of sight behind the walls of St Andrew’s House.  And he reached a conclusion that that was not an option that attracted him.  Now, as we said earlier, in the passage of time, not exactly that option, but something rather close to it came back onto the table, although there was a significant difference in that it was not proposed to put the debating chamber then in the central courtyard where it would be hemmed in on four sides by high masonry walls, but to put it to the south east of the building in quite a large car park. 

 

292.          Mr Campbell QC:  And you have noted that your minute of 16 June was confirmed by Ms Teale, the Deputy Private Secretary, as being correct?

 

293.          Mr Brown:  Correct.  Yes.

 

294.          Mr Campbell QC:  That is right — as reflecting the Secretary of State’s views at that time?

 

295.          Mr Brown:  Yes. 

 

296.          Mr Campbell QC:  Just for your notes that is SE/2/126, but I do not need to call it up.  Thank you. 

 

297.          Mr Brown:  It is a one-liner, I think.

 

298.          Mr Campbell QC:  Indeed.  So have we got to a point, Mr Brown, in the second or third week of June, the Secretary of State was instructing work to be done on additional options?  Can I ask you what you did then, or instructed to be done then?

 

299.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  The first thing that I did was to discuss this large piece of work, which we had been asked to undertake, with colleagues who would be able to help by virtue of their professional knowledge and background, and, in particular, Anthony Andrew, the Chief Estates Officer, who we mentioned earlier.

 

300.          We also, I think, crucially, engaged the help of the City of Edinburgh Council, on the basis — as planning authority and local authority generally — they would have a substantial amount of knowledge of site availability and the availability of buildings for conversion in Edinburgh.  And that was really a programme of work of site search and selection and feasibility work that was carried out over the summer by Anthony  Andrew and myself and other staff who were involved from time to time, but, critically, with a lot of input and a lot of very ready help from City of Edinburgh Council — from the Planning and Building Control people — I think, certainly Andrew Holmes who was, I think, the Development Director at the City of Edinburgh Council at that time. He was extremely helpful, and so was Tom Aitchison, the Chief Executive.

 

301.          At the same time, we realised that we would have to put together a formal list of criteria for site selection, and that was done.  The bones of that are recorded in the White Paper, and were agreed with the Secretary of State.  It was further elaborated in discussion with the Scottish Parliament Building Steering Group on 1 August, and the Inquiry has before it, I think, a copy of a letter from me to Tom Aitchison, dated 8 August, where I have set out in fair detail the selection criteria that we wanted to work to, and that we wanted City of Edinburgh Council to work to.  And City of Edinburgh Council produced a long list of about 30 possible sites and buildings that they believed could possibly serve the purpose.  That was narrowed down fairly rapidly to a shortlist of about five, and then subsequently to three.  And, as the Inquiry already knows, these three were a site on the junction of Morrison Street and Dalry Road, which is referred to universally as Haymarket; a site at Leith near Victoria Quay; and a site that is variously referred to as Calton Hill or Regent Road, but forms basically St Andrew’s House and the Old Royal High School.

 

302.          Mr Campbell QC:  OK.  Could we look at SE/2/012 please, and see if that has the document to which you are referring. 

 

303.          Mr Brown:  Yes, that is my letter to Tom Aitchison.  Yes, and the attachment to that — there should be a two-page letter, and then a multi-page Annex. 

 

304.          Mr Campbell QC:  Can we look at SE/2/014 then please?

 

305.          Mr Brown:  That is the document. 

 

306.          Mr Campbell QC:  Yes.  Now, let us just see what you are talking about here.  What were you trying to do with this document?

 

307.          Mr Brown:  With this document?  Yes.  We were attempting to set out objectively and clearly, because work against these criteria about to be undertaken — work was going to be undertaken by others — we were attempting to set out objectively and clearly what factors should be evaluated in assessing sites; and first of all, in selecting a shortlist, and then, by implication, in assessing the shortlisted sites in relation to each other.

 

308.          Mr Campbell QC:  In the letter to Tom Aitchison, did you ask for his views on environmental impact or local economic impact?

 

309.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

310.          Mr Campbell QC:  And did you say to him that you would, yourselves, be assessing security operations, security considerations?

 

311.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

312.          Mr Campbell QC:  And you then ask him particularly for his analysis of the two possible Regent Road options, and one of the Morrison Street options?

 

313.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  The reason for that was that, clearly, the council owned the Old Royal High School and owned the solum of Regent Road, so they were closely interested there, and then at Morrison Street — what I call here the Morrison Street option — later known as the Haymarket option, the council owned the site. 

 

314.          Mr Campbell QC:  If we just look through this Annex, where you see that you are setting down, really, the sort of obvious criteria, which anybody with skill would set down looking for a new major building; costs, impact on timetable, access, physical surroundings, environmental and economic impact, and it goes on to think about the impact on the Scottish Office, presumably as a reference to the Scottish Office establishment. 

 

315.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

316.          Mr Campbell QC:  And the staff.

 

317.          Mr Brown:  That is correct.  Yes.

 

318.          Mr Campbell QC:  Did you get, in response, SE/2/016 from the City of Edinburgh which is described as a draft discussion paper?

 

319.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  This is the work that, as I recall, Andrew Holmes and other senior colleagues were very helpful in providing. 

 

320.          Mr Campbell QC:  So there was an assessment, really, in accordance with your request?

 

321.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  That is correct.

 

322.          Mr Campbell QC:  Mr Brown, did you report to the Secretary of State on 25 August, and again on 4 September, on site selection issues?

 

323.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  That is correct.

 

324.          Mr Campbell QC:  Could I look at your minute of 4 September please?

 

325.          Mr Brown:  4 September, yes.

 

326.          Mr Campbell QC:  SE/2/302 please.  And the next page (SE/2/303) please.  You say there:

 

327.  “as Ministers know, research has been conducted. A long lost of 27 sites was identified, and that is attached”.

 

11.15 am.

 

328.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

329.          Mr Campbell QC:  And then you have, or you tell the Secretary of State that the long list has been refined to a short list, namely St Andrew’s House, re-use of St Andrew’s House and the Royal High School, the existing debating chamber, a vacant site in Leith, or a vacant site at Haymarket.

 

330.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

331.          Mr Campbell QC:  Did you attend later with the Secretary of State to discuss these choices?

 

332.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  Just give me a second, please, to —

 

333.          Mr Campbell QC:  Yes.  I think this is quite a long minute, Mr Brown, and it runs for seven pages, and attempts an assessment of each of the options.

 

 

334.          If you will forgive me, I am not going to take you through the text of that because we can read it for ourselves in due course, but I would like to know what the Secretary of State’s response was when you came to consider that.

 

335.          Mr Brown:  There was a substantial meeting with the Secretary of State and Mr McLeish on 5 September. That is the day after I had sent forward this advice, and that is recorded in a minute from Mr Lugton, the Secretary of State’s Private Secretary, to me, dated the 5^th, and that provides a pretty full account of the Secretary of State’s views on the different options.

 

336.          Mr Campbell QC:  Yes.

 

337.          Mr Brown:  And I attended that meeting.

 

338.          Mr Campbell QC:  SE/2/204. Thank you. This is Mr Lugton to you with others copied in.

 

339.          Mr Brown:  Yes

 

340.          Mr Campbell QC:  We see that Ministers wanted further details of the costs of alternative proposals of Leith and Calton Hill, the CERT scheme, arrangements for temporary housing for the Parliament and the matter to be put on hold till the Secretary of State came back from America.

 

341.          Mr Brown:  Yes

 

342.          Mr Campbell QC:  Then he says in paragraph 3 he did not see a strong case for Parliament to be located at Haymarket, and that is discussed. He describes it as “second best” in relation to Calton Hill in terms of centrality, “second best” in terms of suitability of a new building.  He then considers Calton Hill, and I see in paragraph 5 that Mr Munro of Historic Scotland was embraced in the discussion at that time.

 

343.          Mr Brown: Yes, yes indeed.

 

344.          Mr Campbell QC:  He was there, was he?

 

345.          Mr Brown:  He would have been present, yes. The very first paragraph of Mr Lugton’s minute records who was present.

 

346.          Mr Campbell QC:  Yes, and that includes Mr Graeme Munro?

 

347.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

348.          Mr Campbell QC:  So there is discussion of the Royal High School. If we move to SE/2/206, there is then discussion of Leith, and I think this is all brought together in paragraph 15 when he talks about comparative costs. Mr Brown, did you have an impression at this meeting whether the Secretary of State had done his homework and had read his papers for this meeting?

 

349.          Mr Brown:  Well, clearly, it is six years ago and one’s recollection is not as clear as it might be but all through the process my impression was that this was an issue that the Secretary of State was very interested in, and despite the weight of the paper that he was getting he was closely informed of the arguments and of the advice.

 

350.          Mr Campbell QC:  So he was not just sitting there as a passive person at the meeting?

 

351.          Mr Brown:  Certainly not, no.  I would say that he led the discussion and asked the questions and very much kept us on our toes in terms of the answers that we could give.

 

352.          Mr Campbell QC:  He tells us in paragraph 18 that he did not wish to make an announcement before the referendum but he was keen to make progress and an early announcement. Further advice on costs of Calton Hill and Leith, further report on the CERT scheme and no objection to continuing discussions with Forth Ports with a view to clarifying their position.

 

353.          Mr Brown:  Yes

 

354.          Mr Campbell QC:  Tell me about the general level of enthusiasm for the quality of the sites which were available. You had done the work on a long list; you had got it down to three or perhaps four. Were you happy that you had good choices?

 

355.          Mr Brown:  Obviously the difficulty in selecting a site is that one is constrained by the practical reality of what is available and, you know, it might seem a nice idea to put the new Parliament building in Princes Street Gardens or something like that, but that was not practically available. We were quite clear from the exhaustive work that had been done by and with City of Edinburgh Council that the shortlist that we had did represent the best available options at that time.

 

356.          I am not sure if I can give you an answer to your question about how enthusiastic were the Secretary of State and the rest of us about the choice of sites, but I can certainly make the fairly obvious point that there were a lot of questions that the Secretary of State wanted to ask about all of them. His concern, or the questions that he wanted to ask about Calton Hill or Regent Road or St Andrew’s House option, was how the building would be adapted to provide an effective and efficient working home for the Parliament and for MSPs.

 

357.          For example, he was concerned about the fact that Regent Road bisected the site, and he wanted us to follow that through, and then at Leith he expressed interest in how a building with the necessary civic presence could be created in an operational seaport, which was what Leith was and is. I think the fact that he was making these points and asking these questions show how engaged he was with the issues. And then at Haymarket he was interested in how in a fairly humdrum environment a building of presence and appropriate appearance could be constructed. So he quizzed us really on all of these issues and sought further information about them.

 

358.          Lord Fraser:  Could I ask you just to go back to SE/2/205, Mr Brown? The Mr Munro referred to here is Mr Graeme Munro, who was at this time Head of Historic Scotland.

 

359.          Mr Brown:  That is correct, yes.

 

360.          Lord Fraser:  Quite a powerful figure in the determination of where buildings should be located in Edinburgh or elsewhere, and interestingly he says:

 

361.  “there would not be any difficulty about a modern building being added to the existing complex of buildings”.

 

362.          Was that the first time he had expressed that view of the possibility of putting a new building next to the Old Royal High School?

 

363.          Mr Brown:  I could not tell you, Lord Fraser, the answer to that. Clearly, Historic Scotland were a very important player in developing options and in assessing them, and we were in touch frequently with Historic Scotland; for example, we would have consulted them on the site search. I am pretty sure that Graeme Munro would not be expressing a view here that took us all by surprise, so I am sure we were familiar with this view when he expressed it to the Secretary of State.

 

364.          Lord Fraser: It is a pretty powerful view for the Head of Historic Scotland to express the view that in his view the Calton site was “the best of all possibilities”. Notwithstanding that willingness of the Head of Historic Scotland to see some adaptation of what was on the Calton Hill, or new build and some adaptation, it does not seem to have been pursued that vigorously.

 

365.          Mr Brown:  You mean thereafter?

 

366.          Lord Fraser:  Yes

 

367.          Mr Brown: Well, as the Inquiry knows, the Calton Hill site… I should make clear here that the words “Calton Hill” relate to a scheme involving St Andrew’s House, the Old Royal High and possibly a debating chamber between them. That option remained in full consideration and was a subject of the architectural feasibility study that we have referred to already. It remained in full consideration right up to the wire as it were, and I am sure that the Secretary of State took account of Graeme Munro’s view.

 

368.          Lord Fraser:  We will be hearing, I think, in due course from Mr Munro, but he had some concerns that while he had attached some reservations about the Calton Hill site, about proposals for a funicular and the like, that in the way this was taken forward those relatively secondary reservations that he had seemed to be elevated into major objections on the part of Historic Scotland.

 

369.          Mr Brown:  I am not sure if I can comment on that, Lord Fraser. It depends upon the detail, and as you have indicated Graeme Munro would be best able to advise on this. Much depends on the detail of the particular proposal relating to the Regent Road, St Andrew’s House, Calton Hill site and if there were developers at that time in Edinburgh who had ideas for linking New Street — the bus garage at the foot of the crag on which St Andrew’s House stands — and St Andrew’s House itself by some kind of railway as far as I recall, and I am sure Historic Scotland would have had reservations about that. As Graeme is making clear here, he was particularly keen, I think, that these category A listed buildings should remain in vibrant use, and that was certainly a concern of Historic Scotland that category A listed buildings should be reused and preserved, obviously, if at all possible.

 

370.          Mr Campbell QC:  Thank you. I took you initially to your minute of 4 September, which is SE/2/302. Now attached to that, Mr Brown, I think I took from you an answer which explained that you had considered in some detail each of the options at that time in that minute.

 

371.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

372.          Mr Campbell QC:  I am not sure if it was attached to it or came the same day from another source but there is an Annex called Annex A, which we have at SE/2/316.

 

373.          Mr Brown:  Yes, these would have been attached to the minute when it went forward to Ministers.

 

374.          Mr Campbell QC:  And once again you have employed a tabular layout in order to, as it were, summarise the information. Can I just understand that I am correct that what we see here are the various factors and criteria which you have looked at in respect of each of the three options?

 

375.          Mr Brown: They are.

 

376.          Mr Campbell QC:  Indeed this Annex goes on for some pages looking at a variety of different criteria.

 

377.          Mr Brown:  Yes it does. It is very full, and my recollection is that the commentary would have been provided by City of Edinburgh Council. There may have been some additions and adjustments to it made by myself and my colleagues but basically it was City of Edinburgh Council’s commentary.

 

378.          Mr Campbell QC:  Can we, for the Inquiry’s benefit then, simply page through from SE/2/316,  SE/2/317, SE/2/318,  SE/2/319, SE/2/320,  SE/2/321, SE/2/322,  SE/2/323, SE/2/324,  SE/2/325, SE/2/326,  SE/2/327 and SE/2/328. Paging through we see the various criteria set out in the left-hand column in each case.

 

379.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

380.          Mr Campbell QC:  And again without taking you through the detail of them, one page at a time: running cost; timetable; preparation; timetable factors; status; planning issues; listing issues; access; public transport; vehicle access; pedestrian access; physical status and location; environmental impact issues; economic impact issues.

 

381.          Mr Brown, it seems to me, and correct me if I am wrong, it seems to me this is an important milestone in the consideration process because this is a point at which you have taken a breath and you have put down in this form, really everything you know about the three choices.  Is that right?

 

11.30 am

 

382.          Mr Brown:  I think that is fair, yes.  Certainly everything that we and City of Edinburgh Council knew about these physical and locational characteristics. As the Annex itself explains and as the notes to Annex B go on to make clear, the information about costs that we included, I think the words we used were that—

 

383.  “Capital cost estimates were very broad and were included to enable comparison between the three sites, rather than as a firm indication of likely final costs.”

 

384.          Mr Campbell QC:  Can I just ask you to look at page SE/2/314in this sequence please?

 

385.          Mr Brown:  Annex B, please.

 

386.          Mr Campbell QC:  Is that the Annex you are referring to?

 

387.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

388.          Mr Campbell QC:  Now just tell us what we are seeing there, please, will you.

 

389.          Mr Brown:  What we are seeing is one of these wonderful public sector comparisons that differentiates between economic cost and financial cost, which I do not think we need bother about too much.  The thing to look at is financial costs; that is two here.  These are very approximate, as the note says.  They include information about site costs, and for some reason which I cannot now explain to the Inquiry, the figure opposite Haymarket — which had a site value of about £6 million — is zero.  I suspect that that may just be a mistake.

 

390.          It then goes on to look at build costs — sorry, can I take that back?  My eye goes to the economic costs at the top, and there is a cost recorded there of £6 million, so it was a factor that we had taken into account, but was not included for whatever reason in the financial cost.  I think possibly because it would have been zero sum to the public sector; it would have been a transfer payment between the Scottish Office and the City of Edinburgh Council.  So, it was not a mistake, it was deliberate.

 

391.          Mr Campbell QC:  Classification.

 

392.          Mr Brown:  Yes, indeed.  Thank you.

 

393.          What you see there is building costs:  very broad brush.  The fact that all the numbers end in either a five or a zero tends to suggest that we were working to the nearest £5 million at that stage, and that is backed up by the wording — that the tables are necessarily very approximate.

 

394.          There is then a figure in for St Andrew’s House refurbishment, and we can talk further about that if the Inquiry would find it helpful, and then the relocation of staff out of St Andrew’s House, and there is a figure of £19 million there.  Now this is a pretty early stage in the consideration of these costs, and that cost changes quite substantially — it is reduced later in the —

 

395.          Mr Campbell QC:  But importantly, in your perspective at this time, you were recognising, were you not, that you would not only have a build cost and a site cost, but that you might have significant on costs caused by redisposition of staff?

 

396.          Mr Brown:  Yes, that is correct.  And I think this is the first discussion at which that begins to be brought out for Ministers. 

 

397.          Mr Campbell QC:  Can we just look at the note at the foot of this page, please?  You say:

 

398.  “Finally, building costs at Haymarket are based, as the main submission says, on a comparison with what £40 million, including fees and VAT would buy at Leith.”

 

399.          Can you just explain that sentence to me?

 

400.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  At this stage we were not working on building designs; we were working on a project, or rather on a building brief, which at this point would still, I think, have been indicating 12,000 square metres.  We were clear, from the earlier work that we have already discussed — earlier work undertaken by Construction and Building Control Group — that it would be possible to build a 12,000 square metre Parliament building at Leith for £40 million, including fees and VAT as the note says here, and we used that, as it were, as a benchmark, or a datum line, for comparing Leith with the other new build site, which was Haymarket.  What the quantity surveyors were telling us was that it would cost roughly, e.g. not exceeding another £10 million to build the same building on the Haymarket site, and the reason for that would be the city centre location requiring mechanical air handling, air conditioning and so on, probably a higher standard of sound insulation and possibly some special foundation works to take account of the tunnels at Haymarket.

 

401.          Mr Campbell QC:  At SE/2/315, which is the next page to this, can we see a couple of paragraphs headed “Commentary on Capital Costs”?

 

402.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

403.          Mr Campbell QC:  And do we see in the first of those two paragraphs the second sentence:

 

404.  “In effect, this means that a Parliament building could be bought for £40 million at Leith.”

 

405.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

406.          Mr Campbell QC:  Were you materially assisted in arriving at that estimated figure by any work that had been contributed to you by Forth Ports?

 

407.          Mr Brown:  I cannot recall the detail of work that Forth Ports were doing at that stage.  I can certainly remember interactions with Forth Ports because we had to discuss with them for example, what land might be available for building at Leith. 

 

408.          However, I am clear that the £40 million including fees and VAT came not from Forth Ports but from our own calculations — from our own in-house quantity surveyors, possibly at that stage assisted by external experts.

 

409.          Mr Campbell QC:  I just wondered if whether the contribution that Forth Ports had made to the discussion up to this point had helped you settle on £40 million as an indicative figure.

 

410.          Mr Brown:  I am pretty clear that their contribution would not have contributed to our arriving at that figure; I think that was our own figure.  What Forth Ports were doing at that stage was considering site options and also beginning to consider what the implications would be for their development scheme of Leith, including the Ocean Terminal, of course, which is actually built now. 

 

411.          Mr Campbell QC:  It is also true, is it not, that as Forth Port’s thinking evolved and they made successive submissions to you, that part of those submissions included their idea of what an indicative style of project might look like?

 

412.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  I am sure they had architects and designers who would have done that kind of work and enabled them to present it to us. 

 

413.          Mr Campbell QC:  Mr Brown, did a meeting take place on 5 September following the submission of this advice? 

 

414.          Mr Brown:  Yes, yes, absolutely, and that is what is recorded in Mr Lugton’s minute to me of the same date.

 

415.          Mr Campbell QC:  Indeed.  And was a decision taken in respect of the option of using the Old Royal High School debating chamber, even on a temporary basis?

 

416.          Mr Brown:  Well, yes it was.  As it happened, Mr Lugton’s 11 September (SE/2/204) minute of the meeting did not, as far as I could see, record that specific point. I had a few points to make on his minute and that first of all, it seemed to me that the Secretary of State had clearly ruled out as unsatisfactory the fall-back option of using the existing Old Royal High School debating chamber.

 

417.          Mr Campbell QC:  Yes.

 

418.          Mr Brown:  I am not sure actually if I got a response to that, but as far as I was concerned my note of the 11^th just confirmed my understanding of what was discussed, and if that had not been correct I would have got a note back saying it was not correct.

 

419.          Mr Campbell QC:  So it is not in Mr Lugton’s minute, but that is your recollection and you picked it up with him in subsequent correspondence?

 

420.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  Well, it is not so much my recollection as the results of my notes and what not and my immediate reaction as soon as I got Michael’s minute, which was within a week of the meeting itself, so I would be pretty clear that that was right, and in fact I have said to you in the light of the Secretary of State’s views we will proceed no further with costing of the Old Royal High School debating chamber option.  In fact I have given reasons here, I see in this minute, the reasons that the Secretary of State would have given at the meeting on 5 September, where he says fairly significantly, I think, that because a temporary solution, that is—

 

421.   “The Old Royal High School debating chamber is a temporary solution  to be used in the interim while a new Parliament made up its own mind about long-term accommodation would not be consistent in presentational terms with the permanent place which the Government saw the Parliament having in Scottish affairs.”

 

422.          Mr Campbell QC:  Can you tell me what you are reading from?

 

423.          Mr Brown:  Sorry, this is a minute from myself dated 11 September to PS to the Secretary of State, Michael Lugton, and this is from paragraph 2.  I am sure this will have come to the Inquiry.

 

424.          Mr Campbell QC:  Yes, I have it — SE/2/210, thank you:

 

425.  “My recollection is that his reasons for doing so were the clearly unsatisfactory nature of the Old Royal High School debating chamber in terms of public access and the lack of adequate accommodation immediately adjacent, because a temporary solution to be used in the interim would not be consistent in presentational terms with the permanent place which the Government saw the Parliament having in Scottish affairs.”

 

426.          His reasons for doing so means what?  His reasons for ruling out?

 

427.          Mr Brown:  His reasons for ruling out, yes.

 

428.          Mr Campbell QC:  So he was not ruling out the Regent Road option completely, he was ruling out the Royal High School as a debating chamber?

 

429.          Mr Brown:  No, the reference is back to the second sub-paragraph of paragraph 6 of my minute, 4 September. Can I just read it?

 

430.          Mr Campbell QC:  Yes, please do.

 

431.          Mr Brown:  The second sub-paragraph of paragraph 6 says:

 

432.  “Fall back on the existing debating chamber in the Old Royal High School building with offices and other accommodation in St Andrew’s House, providing a low-cost and probably temporary home for the Parliament and leaving it to take final decisions later.”

 

433.          Lord Fraser:  Can you tell me to what extent the language that you use in this minute is, as best you can recall, an accurate reflection of the Secretary of State’s own wording?  Because we try quite hard to discover why the temporary solution, leaving the Parliament to resolve its own fate, was not a line that was followed.  It would seem to me that this is rather important phrasing if it reflects his thoughts at the time, that it would not be consistent with the:

 

434.  “…permanent place which the Government saw the Parliament having in Scottish affairs.”

 

435.          To the best of your recollection, that is what was in his mind, “I do not want a temporary solution because that does not fit with what Government wants”? 

 

436.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  These are not words that I would imagine I would have made up myself, as it were, so I am pretty clear that it reflects what was in the Secretary of State’s mind.  I am also reasonably confident that these would either be, or be very close to, the words that Mr Dewar actually used at the meeting on 5 September.  I imagine I took notes at that meeting; I do not have them now, but I imagine I scribbled down what the Secretary of State was saying, and that these are reflected at least reasonably closely in my note of 11 September.

 

437.          Mr Campbell QC:  What can we say, then, as a result of those comments and those observations about the Secretary of State’s view about providing a temporary home and leaving the bigger issues of a permanent home to the Parliament when elected?

 

438.          Mr Brown:  Well, that is a large question, clearly, Mr Campbell.  I believe that these words that are attributed to the Secretary of State, or at least the opinions that are attributed to him here in this minute of the 11^th, which we have open in front of us (SE/2/210) do reflect the consistent view of the Secretary of State. 

 

439.          Now, you might ask me why do I think that.  I think that view was tested early on, away back in Mr McLeish’s response to my minute of 4 June.  He ventured the suggestion that at least it would be a possibility to leave the Parliament to make up its own mind about location and building and so on.  My understanding is that the Secretary of State was not in favour of that.  So there is a bit of evidence that that was the opinion and the view that he had then.  And now, four months later, in the middle of September we have him saying more or less the same thing.  It seems to me that gives us a bit of evidence that that was indeed his mind. 

 

440.          Mr Campbell QC: So to summarise that just before you move on:  no temporary home because the Parliament is seen as having a pre-eminent place in Scottish affairs; rule out the Royal High School as a debating chamber for that reason and continue to consider options as at 11 September. 

 

441.          Mr Brown: Yes, that is right.  I would have to add in another clarificatory comment on that which was that by that time the Secretary of State had accepted that a building would not be ready by the end of 1999 — either then or April 2000.  I do not quite recall then what the plan was for the timing of the first meeting of the Parliament, but either January or April 2000 would have been programmed then as the time of the first meeting.  He understood and accepted that it was very, very likely that we would need some form of interim accommodation. 

 

442.          Mr Campbell QC: You are anticipating the next question which was:  had he had advice about the feasibility of completing a permanent home in accordance with his own timetable?  I think the answer is yes; he had had advice. 

 

443.          Mr Brown: Yes, he had, certainly in the run of submissions that are before us there will have been advice on the that.

 

444.          Mr Campbell QC: I do not need to find it.  A “yes” is fine.  It is your understanding, is it, that he had had advice that he could not achieve a completed permanent home in accordance with his own stipulated timetable?

 

445.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

446.          Mr Campbell QC: It must follow from that, mustn’t it, that there would also be some acceptance of a need for a temporary home? 

 

447.          Mr Brown: Yes. That is clear, yes.

 

448.          Mr Campbell QC: How does that sit with paragraph 2 of your minute of 11 September, which you have just referred us to, and particularly the last phrase in the paragraph: 

 

449.  “and because the investment necessary to make the ORHS debating chamber useable, even as a temporary measure, would effectively be money wasted.”

 

450.          It is just a reference to that location is it, not to any temporary location?

 

451.          Mr Brown: Yes, well, where that has come from is that was the Secretary of State’s response to the option described in sub-paragraph 2, the second sub-paragraph of paragraph 6 of the submission of 4 September, which referred to

 

452.  “falling back on the existing debating chamber with offices and other accommodation at St Andrew’s House providing a low-cost and probably temporary home.”

 

453.          This was not a clear bit of advice to the Secretary of State about the interim accommodation for the Parliament.  We were saying, “Secretary of State, we still have in the frame — because you have not told us to exclude it — the possibility of using the existing debating chamber there in the Old Royal High building.  It might be on a temporary basis, but tell us what you think of that.” 

 

454.          Mr Campbell QC: Wearing any other hat at the time, Mr Brown, were you engaged in a search for temporary accommodation?

 

455.          Mr Brown: Yes, we were.  I say that, but I could not tell you in which month of 1997 we began to look hard for temporary accommodation.  If it would assist the Inquiry we can look into that and let you know.  There was certainly a lot of work done between autumn 1997 and Easter 1998 when the decision to place the Parliament temporarily at the Church of Scotland Assembly Hall was announced.  I think that we were beginning to get into that at this stage, but not in-depth at 4 September. 

 

456.          Mr Campbell QC: Are you OK to go on, Mr Brown, or would you like a break?

 

457.          Mr Brown: I would not mind five minutes, actually. 

 

458.          Lord Fraser: We will take five minutes then.

 

[Informal break]

 

459.          Mr  Campbell QC: At about this time, that is to say 5 to 11 September, did you get any advice from Development Department colleagues about the need for environmental assessment of any of the potential options? 

 

460.          Mr Brown: Yes, it would have been about this time that I certainly personally first realised that there was a need for a full and formal assessment of the environmental impact of the sites.  It was pointed out to me that the Scottish Office’s own planning guidelines relating to major developments required developers to submit full environmental impact assessments with the proposals.

 

461.          Mr Campbell QC: Not to mention European legislation.  

 

462.          Mr Brown: Well, indeed, yes.

 

463.          Mr Campbell QC: I just want to establish did you get that advice? 

 

464.          Mr Brown: Yes, I did, yes.

 

465.          Mr Campbell QC: Was the compulsory nature of such an assessment made clear to you?

 

466.          Mr Brown: I could not now say, but I certainly quickly formed a view that we could not go any further forward without commissioning formal environmental impact assessments. 

 

467.          Mr Campbell QC: Was that done?

 

468.          Mr Brown: Yes, it was.

 

469.          Mr Campbell QC: In respect of which site?

 

470.          Mr Brown: In respect of the three shortlisted sites; that is Leith, Haymarket and Regent Road.

 

471.          Mr Campbell QC: Can you tell me when it was done?

 

472.          Mr Brown: Yes, I will have that information.  It may just take me a minute to review my notes here.

 

12.00

 

473.          I should be able to tell you on what date we engaged Scott Wilson Kirpatrick to undertake that work.  It was not until 4 November actually that we announced the commissioning of formal environmental impact assessments by SWK [Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick].  But I see from my notes, which are available to the Inquiry, in paragraph 3.11 — I do not know if that is available to the Inquiry or just to counsel —I see that it was:

 

474.  “becoming apparent that choosing a non-city-centre location like Leith would be potentially controversial on environmental grounds because of the number of associated car journeys.  Development Department colleagues advised that a full comparative environmental impact assessment should be undertaken in line with the Scottish Office’s own planning guidelines.” 

 

475.          Mr Campbell QC:  Yes.  And I have put to you also that the overarching legislation —

 

476.          Mr Brown:  I fully accept that, and I recall now that that was part of our consideration. 

 

477.          Mr Campbell QC:  And can you confirm to me whether the instructions to SWK were just for a transport study or for something more far-reaching? 

 

478.          Mr Brown:  My recollection is that we instructed them to carry out an environmental impact in fulfilment of our obligations. 

 

479.          Mr Campbell QC:  Can I just, before we leave it, go back to your minute of 4 September, SE/2/303, which you have told me is reflected in the discussion of 11 September? It is the point about the low-cost and probably temporary home and leaving it to take final decisions later. 

 

480.          I think I am fair in summarising your evidence thus:  by this time the Secretary of State recognised first of all that he was not going to be in a permanent home according to his own deadline. 

 

481.          Mr Brown:  Yes. 

 

482.          Mr Campbell QC:  That is fair, is it?  It would follow therefore, would it not, that he must also have recognised that there was a need for a temporary home? 

 

483.          Mr Brown:  Yes. 

 

484.          Mr Campbell QC:  You have told me that, wearing another hat, you had begun the business of looking for a temporary home. 

 

485.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  We had certainly begun to think about that; whether we had begun a formal search by 4 September I would not like to say.  But it would be about this time. 

 

486.          Mr Campbell QC:  What criteria were applied, do you think, in ruling out the Old Royal High School as a temporary home? 

 

487.          Mr Brown:  You are asking me what criteria Mr Dewar would have applied?

 

488.          Mr Campbell QC:  Well, I have not put it quite that way.  You were at all these meetings, and you would be taking the mind of the Minister; you would form an impression.  I am asking you to be somewhat subjective, if I may, and see if you can help us to understand the sense of what he was thinking in relation to ruling out the possibility of the Old Royal High School as a temporary home. 

 

489.          Mr Brown:  I think that the best I could do there is to refer back to the views that the Secretary of State expressed after his visit to the Old Royal High School building on 30 May, which are recorded to some extent in his Private Secretary’s note of 2 June.  Basically, and this is maybe a slightly gilded recollection of events, when Mr Dewar visited the building that day — I was not with him on 30 May, but some of my colleagues were — he noted the physically constrained nature of the debating chamber.  My recollection is that the debating chamber at the Old Royal High School is in the order of 300 sq metres, and in all our plans we discussed 1,200 sq metres.  It was a quarter of the size of our early thinking on what a debating chamber would require. 

 

490.          He was struck by its constrained nature.  He was particularly struck by the difficult public access to the gallery.

 

491.          Mr Campbell QC:  I think I know all this, Mr Brown, because we have seen it in earlier minutes.  It is not quite what I am after.  What I am after is that thinking has clearly evolved through June, July and August in many directions.  At 11 September we seem to have in the document SE/2/210 an inherent contradiction:  on the one hand you are ruling out an available temporary site, which is the Old Royal High School; and on the other hand the Secretary of State is saying to you, “A temporary solution would not be consistent in presentational terms with my permanent idea for a Scottish Parliament.”  What I would like to get a sense of is why was the Old Royal High School ruled out as a possible temporary home? 

 

492.          You began to give me an answer, with a keen eye on history as you have, looking back to 30 May.  I know what happened on 30 May, but I do find it difficult to accept that such a final view might have been arrived at just on the basis of one visit. 

 

493.          Mr Brown:  I can offer you another interpretation because we are talking about my interpretation here of what was in the Secretary of State’s mind.  The second sub-paragraph of paragraph 6 of my note of 4 September refers to:

 

494.  “providing a low-cost and probably temporary home for the Parliament and leaving it to take final decisions later.”

 

495.          My minute of 11 September, which is on the screen now, repeats these words:

 

496.  “because a temporary solution to be used in the interim while a new Parliament made up its own mind about long-term accommodation.” 

 

497.          That is rather different from the concept of interim accommodation that would be only used until the permanent building was available.  I would suggest that that is a different thing.

 

498.          Mr Campbell QC:  Are you making a distinction between two kinds of temporary home? 

 

499.          Mr Brown:  Yes. 

 

500.          Mr Campbell QC:  On the one hand a temporary home to be followed by a permanent home to be provided by Donald Dewar and the Scottish Office; on the other hand a temporary home to be succeeded in the fullness of time by something devised by parliamentarians for their own use? 

 

501.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  I think these words do suggest that. 

 

502.          Mr Campbell QC:  Let us focus back then on the Old Royal High School and ask ourselves the question:  why, if it was available, was it not seen by the Secretary of State as a possible temporary home in either of those eventualities?  He knew by then that you could not have a permanent home to his own timetable. 

 

503.          Mr Brown:  Again, you are asking me to give a view of what would have been in the Secretary of State’s mind.  I think I would be safe in saying that he did not favour using the Old Royal High School debating chamber and other spaces as an interim solution to be occupied by the Parliament until it made up its mind.  The reason that he did not favour that, I think, if I can look into what was then in his mind, was because he did not favour that at all as a policy.  In other words, he was anxious, and I think from accounts that I have heard and that the Inquiry has heard, that all speed should be made with the preparation of a permanent home. 

 

504.          He also accepted, and we were telling him, that the timetable that was unavoidably associated with preparing a permanent home did require the Parliament to sit somewhere else other than its permanent home for some little time at the beginning of its life.  It seems to me that it was quite logical for him to accept that; it was not logical to accept anything else because the Parliament had to function somewhere until its permanent home was ready.  So he accepted that, but he did not accept what was being suggested in my note of 4 July, which was: here is an option that the Parliament may occupy for some time until it had made up its own mind about where it should sit.

 

505.          I would suggest to you that that is consistent with his not taking on Mr McLeish’s suggestion made back at the beginning of June. 

 

506.          Mr Campbell QC:  The 11 June; I think we saw it. 

 

507.          Mr Brown:  Could I also just say, in case this might be open to misinterpretation, that, sitting here, I cannot now remember whether when we talked about evaluating options for the interim accommodation we looked at the Old Royal High School.  We may have done so.  If it would help the Inquiry we can provide information about the range of options that was evaluated for the interim accommodation. 

 

508.          Mr Campbell QC:  I think we have some documentation about that, but if you have anything in addition we would find that of assistance, thank you.  Sir, do you have any more questions about that matter before I move on?

 

509.          Lord Fraser:  I follow that distinction that you are drawing now, which I had not really previously taken on board.

 

510.          Mr Brown:  Just to elaborate that very slightly if it is all right to do so:  using the Old Royal High as interim accommodation, and therefore giving the Parliament the time to come to conclusions of its own, would also have had implications for St Andrew’s House, which would have been disruptive, I suppose one could say, of the Scottish Office’s arrangements.  It was not a cost-free option, as it were. 

 

511.          Mr Campbell QC:  It was not presumably an option either that could be taken on its own without a knock-on effect on St Andrew’s House. 

 

512.          Mr Brown:  That is the point I was seeking to make. 

 

513.          Mr Campbell QC:  Mr Brown, moving on a little, can we understand that by mid-September the promoters of Leith, Haymarket and Calton Hill were knocking vigorously on your door to extol the merits of their own sites? 

 

514.          Mr Brown:  Yes, they were certainly in touch with us.  I should make it clear that Forth Ports had been in touch with us, and necessarily so because we were looking at the sites and land that they owned.  Edinburgh Development & Investment Ltd (EDI), the development company that, as I recall, was owned by City of Edinburgh Council, were also approaching us about the potential for developing Regent Road, St Andrew’s House —

 

515.          Mr Campbell QC:  I did not mean to interrupt your train of thought.  All of these three promoters, Forth Ports at Leith, MacDonald Orr at Haymarket and EDI at Calton Hill were keen to see you.  Did you arrange a presentation for the Secretary of State as a result of that pressure? 

 

516.          Mr Brown:  Yes; that was done.  My recollection is that both EDI and Forth Ports were keen to have the opportunity to spread out for the Secretary of State their ideas for how Parliament buildings could be put on the two sites.  At this stage, I could not be sure that MacDonald Orr were in touch with us; I think that possibly happened a little later, but not more than a month later. 

 

517.          Mr Campbell QC:  Did you decide at this point to go for some outside help in assessing what was being put in front of you? 

 

518.          Mr Brown:  Yes.  This had been a consideration obviously from early on.  We put in train a competitive procurement to secure for ourselves some external commercial property expertise.  It was becoming clear to us that this was not simply a matter of selecting between a series of sites all of which were in public ownership and all of which would come with a precise price tag.  There were issues like planning gain and sites being offered free or at less than market value and all that sort of thing.  We felt pretty strongly that we needed external commercial property expertise. 

 

519.          Mr Campbell QC:  What did you do? 

 

520.          Mr Brown:  We, and when I say “we” I mean largely Anthony Andrew and myself but with assistance from others, advertised for commercial property advice and ran a short competition.  As a result of that we selected Jones Lang Wootton in the middle of September to give advice to us on these issues. 

 

521.          Mr Campbell QC: Right. And the specific remit, is that something Mr Andrew is better to talk about than yourself?

 

12.15 pm

 

522.          Mr Brown: He would probably have a closer or a clearer recollection of the sequence of events, although, reminding myself by going through the files in preparation for the Inquiry, I noticed that I wrote to Alan Robertson, who I think was a partner in Jones Lang Wootton, on 23 September saying “Congratulations on your appointment, and here is a whole lot of work that we want you to do very quickly indeed.”

 

523.          Mr Campbell QC: And what did you ask him to do?

 

524.          Mr Brown:  I asked him for an assessment of the three potential sites under a number of criteria, which are part of that letter of 23 September.

 

525.          Mr Campbell QC: Can we look at SE/2/259, please? Can I just be clear, Mr Brown, this is a commission which Jones Lang Wootton gained following a short, competitive tendering process?

 

526.          Mr Brown:  Yes. That is correct.

 

527.          Mr Campbell QC: And you tell him here what you want him to do. You enclose some information, and you ask him for an assessment. Now, there are various property related issues there which are set out, which you are asking about: the private sector contribution; values — site values; and the reasonableness of the information you have already. And at SE/2/260, timetabling risks — you say, specifically:

 

528.  “you are not expected to address construction risks” —

 

529.          acquisition strategy; financial structure of a deal, if I can put it crudely like that?

 

530.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

531.          Mr Campbell QC: And then you enclose a matrix, of which I do not have a copy at the moment, but that was presumably, again, resorting to tabular form.  Was it, just to set out the —

 

532.          Mr Brown: Yes. I would think that it was either identical to, or very close to, the table that was attached to my minute of 4 September, summarising the factors relating to the three sites.

 

533.          Mr Campbell QC: And you asked him in parallel with that to open confidential negotiations about possible acquisition?

 

534.          Mr Brown:  Yes.

 

535.          Mr Campbell QC: So you were motoring forward here in a big way.

 

536.          Mr Brown: Yes, that is fair.

 

537.          Mr Campbell QC: Whether or not MacDonald Orr came forward then or later, did the team have quantity surveyor information from the proposed developers of Leith and Calton Hill, which had to be checked?

 

538.          Mr Brown: Well, did we have quantity surveyor information from the proposers?

 

539.          Mr Campbell QC: Yes.

 

540.          Mr Brown: I am not sure that I could say, now. My colleague, Anthony Andrew might be able to answer that specific question.  

 

541.          Mr Campbell QC: Thank you.

 

542.          Mr Brown: The involvement of quantity surveyors up until this point had been, as far as I recall, our internal, in-house Scottish Office quantity surveyors who were helping to provide estimates of building costs.

 

543.          Mr Campbell QC: Now, did you take forward the results of this exercise to Ministers?

 

544.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

545.          Mr Campbell QC: How did you do that?

 

546.          Mr Brown: Well, we got a rapid turnaround from Alan Robertson in Jones Lang Wootton, and on 29 September, Alan sent us his interim report on the shortlisted sites, and then I burst into print yet again on 8 October with a submission to the Secretary of State.  My minute of 8 October.

 

547.          Mr Campbell QC: Yes. That is SE/2/620.

 

548.          Mr Brown: And this basically brought Ministers up to date on what had transpired in the previous month.

 

549.          Mr Campbell QC: Looking at the screen, is that the document, or the final draft of the document?

 

550.          Mr Brown: It is a draft, and unfortunately, the version of the document which the Inquiry has is a late draft with some handwriting additions, in my handwriting. The version that I have has got exactly the same — as far as I can judge anyway — exactly the same changes, but in final typescript.

 

551.          Mr Campbell QC: I can tell you Sir, that the final draft has been received by the Inquiry, but not yet scanned, so we can work with this for the moment.  Now, what is the purpose here of this submission to Ministers?

 

552.          Mr Brown:  It was part of the progression or the series of advice that we were giving on the issue of site selection, and as the introduction says, it offered Ministers further information, relevant to the selection of a site. And there is quite a lot of information in the submission that we can go into, if you want. Particularly there is interesting information relating to potential building costs on the different sites. Really the key bit of advice in this submission was to do with environmental impact, and the key recommendation, in my view anyway, is in paragraph 20 on page 5 (SE?”?624), which says that — I would be reflecting here the views of my colleagues in the Environment Group, or in the Planning Group, and probably both:

 

553.  “It would be desirable to undertake an environmental impact assessment before a final choice of site is made, not least to avoid the danger of the Secretary of State being accused of not following the policy set out by the Government of placing the environment at the heart of policy-making being criticised of not following our own policy.”

 

554.          And there were sustainable development aspects to that as well. 

 

555.          So in my view really the key bit of the advice here was saying to the Secretary of State “Look, you can’t really make up your mind until you have an environmental impact assessment.”

 

556.          The second set of issues that are covered in this submission that have not really been covered before in the sequence of advice was to do with transport issues, and we drew heavily on the assistance of colleagues in Transport Group within the Scottish Office Development Department, who, in turn, had been closely in touch with City of Edinburgh Council to provide the advice that I think is in paragraphs 21 to 27 (SE/2/625 and SE/2/626).

 

557.          Mr Campbell QC: OK. Sir, with your permission I would just like to take a minute or two to look at some aspects of this, please. You mentioned building costs, environmental issues and transport issues. Could we turn please first of all to paragraph 6, which is on page SE/2/621? You say there —

 

558.  “We suggest that the Secretary of State should postpone a final decision and instead call for more information on the likely costs to the public purse of providing accommodation. This would enable a final decision to be made in due course, in the light of more facts. If Leith were the eventual choice, the environmental and traffic impact would be quantified and could be debated rationally. If Regent Road (or indeed Haymarket) were chosen it should be possible to have fuller view, particularly in relation to potential contributions from others. If the decision is postponed, there would inevitably be a delay in getting the Parliament’s permanent accommodation ready. We would be lucky to have it into its permanent home before the beginning of 2001. We are giving thought to the provision of temporary accommodation, and will provide further advice on this shortly.” 

 

559.          Where had that thought got to by then?

 

560.          Mr Brown: Yes. As I think I probably indicated earlier, I cannot be clear about the sequence of events and the dates on which they took place relating to advice to Ministers on interim accommodation, and I would be very happy to provide some supplementary information to the Inquiry about that.

 

561.          Mr Campbell QC: Well, let us not get sidetracked with that just now.  But I would like to just highlight, if I may, the balancing exercise in paragraph 7. You ask, rhetorically, the question:

 

562.  “If the Secretary of State felt strongly that, on political and presentational grounds, it was important to keep up the momentum and make a decision quickly, he would want to think carefully about value for money and affordability (were he to choose Regent Road), and of the risks of criticism that decisions had been made without detailed knowledge of environmental and traffic impacts, and embarrassment. ” 

 

563.          Mr Campbell QC: It is “embarrassment”?

 

564.          Mr Brown:  I am sure that is what was intended.

 

565.          Mr Campbell QC: Can I just ask you, what are you setting out there for the Secretary of State?

 

566.          Mr Brown: Yes. The use of this phraseology:

 

567.  “if the Secretary of State felt strongly that… it was important to keep up the momentum and make a decision quickly”

 

568.          is, I think, an echo or a reflection of the demanding timetable that all of us were under. And the concept of momentum is one that I recall being spoken about on more than one occasion, and, if it would help the Inquiry, could I just draw attention to a reference, I think by one of the Secretary of State’s Special Advisers, to the need to keep up momentum. Is that in order?

 

569.          Mr Campbell QC: Yes, indeed. Where would you like us to look for that?

 

570.          Mr Brown: It is in a minute from Michael Lugton to myself of 4 September, I think (SE/2/334).

 

571.          Mr Brown: Paragraph 10 of that minute? I would simply draw attention to the second sentence where Ms Alexander suggested that:

 

572.  “to maintain momentum it was important that the announcement be made before the Secretary of State left for America on 20 September.”

 

573.          Now, clearly, that was not in fact done, but I think it gives the Inquiry an impression — and I think an accurate impression — of the desire on the part of the Secretary of State and his Ministerial colleagues and Special Advisers that momentum be maintained. And there may possibly have been a little bit of impatience implied in that with the rather bureaucratic approach of making sure that we had all the information that we needed. And, of course, by then we were beginning to realise that we needed more information on environmental impact.

 

574.          Mr Campbell QC: Yes. Just to be clear about what the announcement, that Wendy Alexander was wanting to be made, was. Was that a final choice announcement, or was it an announcement about Regent Road?

 

575.          Mr Brown: The context of it was whether an announcement of the site should be made before the devolution referendum, which at one point was being discussed. And in paragraph 2 of the minute, the Secretary of State made clear that in the light of current circumstances, which was the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales just at that time, that it would not be appropriate for a shortlist of sites to be announced before the referendum. So we were saying — or the Secretary of State was saying — that no announcement would be made by then, but I think what Ms Alexander was saying was that, nevertheless, we had to maintain momentum and we should not let the grass grow under our feet on this. 

 

576.          Mr Campbell QC: Yes. Right, I am grateful for that assistance in relation to Mr Lugton’s contribution there.

 

577.          I can take you back now to where we were, which was SE/2/622. You picked up here three issues: building costs, environmental issues and transport issues, which I would like to consider with you, please.

 

578.          Mr Brown: Yes, surely.

 

579.          Mr Campbell QC: Could we go to, paragraph 8 (SE/2/622) dealing with background with which we are familiar.  In Annex A, you say—

 

580.  “provides our best current estimates of capital costs associated with each option. The costs are expressed as a range, reflecting some uncertainties.”

 

581.          And then you say what the Annex shows.

 

582.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

583.          Mr Campbell QC: If you could show the Inquiry that Annex, please. I think we find it at SE/2/632. And there have been alterations since the previous Annex that we looked at in another document.

 

584.          Mr Brown:  Yes, indeed.

 

585.          Mr Campbell QC: In addition, there are handwriting alterations, which I take to be yours.

 

586.          Mr Brown: Yes, that is my handwriting, and the manuscript figures are the correct ones.

 

587.          Mr Campbell QC: Right. May we assume that, because you had cause to make a manuscript alteration that you were getting new-evolved advice about the cost?

 

588.          Mr Brown: I think that is a reasonable assumption. As the Inquiry has already heard, we were going as fast as we could on all of this in terms of preparing advice. The normal approach that we took to providing advice was for me to dictate an outline of the issues that I wanted to cover, and then to circulate that to colleagues, sometimes with a covering note requesting contributions to particular issues.

 

589.          This would certainly have gone to colleagues in Construction and Building Control Group, who were most helpful in providing estimated building capital costs, and I expect what happened was that the figure of £71.6 million that was originally typed in was checked and found to be an overstatement.

 

12.30 pm

 

590.          Mr Campbell QC: So we drop £6 million or £6.1 million there, and presumably the drop in fees is consequential on that?

 

591.          Mr Brown: Yes, it would be a straightforward pro rata.

 

592.          Mr Campbell QC: Proportion? And of course the total the same. So somehow, somebody in Construction and Building Control has managed to find a saving of £6 million, which is quite significant in this context, is it not? About 10%.

 

593.          Mr Brown: Yes, it is certainly not trivial. There is nothing in the wording of the submission that I can see that would explain why that adjustment to the figures was made. There may be other witnesses to the Inquiry who could, from their own working papers or whatever, provide some enlightenment on that. I would suggest that Alastair Wyllie or John Gibbons would be the two colleagues most likely to shed light on it.

 

594.          Mr Campbell QC: Let us look at the range of figures, Mr Brown, if we may: £80.5 million to £96.5 million for St Andrew’s House with an integral debating chamber; £72.9 million to £80.2 million with an external debating chamber, and the Royal High School — let us remind ourselves of the date of this —

 

595.          Mr Brown: Yes, 8 October.

 

596.          Mr Campbell QC: 8 October. £49.6 million to £52.1 million for Leith; and Haymarket £62 million to £65 million. So, at this stage, Leith is looking much more attractive, is it not? In cost terms?

 

597.          Mr Brown: In capital cost terms, yes. The difference in building costs between Leith and Haymarket is £11 million, which is more than the difference reported in my earlier advice of, I think, 4 September, where there was a £10 million difference in cost.

 

598.          Mr Campbell QC: Is it correct that at 8 October that the figures we see reflected here represent an up-to-date assessment?

 

599.          Mr Brown: They do, yes. I think it is as well just to remind the Inquiry that the figures in the Annex to 4 September minute were explicity broad-brush, and were designed to help the Secretary of State to see the likely difference in cost of putting more or less the same building on two different sites. And then, of course, the Regent Road, St Andrew’s House option provided a different solution, because much of the building was already there, while what we have in paragraphs 9 to 13 of the minute of 8 October is much more of an estimate prepared by quantity surveyors internally, with I think, external assistance, on a more closely costed estimate.

 

600.          Mr Campbell QC: Now, I was going to ask you how that compared with the advice you were getting independently from Jones Lang Wootton, who I think produced an interim report at this stage.

 

601.          Mr Brown: We did not ask Jones Lang Wootton for advice on building costs. We asked them for advice on everything to do with the sites and commercial issues relating to the sites, but building costs were not part of the JLW commission. Around about this time, and I am not absolutely clear when, colleagues in the Construction and Building Control Group were commissioning other quantity surveyors to give external, expert advice on likely building costs, and they ended up commissioning Davis Langdon & Everest in November. I think by this stage, and again others, Alastair Wyllie and John Gibbons, would be better able to advise than I, but I think that by 8 October, they did have the benefit of external quantity surveying advice.

 

602.          Mr Campbell QC: Just picking up an aside of yours there. Were Davis Langdon & Everest assessments not provided in relation to independently carried out feasibility studies, which were commissioned later?

 

603.          Mr Brown: Yes, indeed. That is true.

 

604.          Mr Campbell QC: Just to be clear, those assessments by DLE related to feasibility studies?

 

605.          Mr Brown: Yes, they were, Mr Campbell. I am confusing the general concept of having external quantity surveying advice with the specifics of Davis Langdon & Everest. But the first sentence of paragraph 11 of my minute of 8 October says that,

 

606.  “The cost estimates have been prepared in consultation with independent quantity surveyors, and they differ from those presented in the minute of 4 September, reflecting further refinement of the accommodation requirements and functional relationships.”

 

607.          Mr Campbell QC: Thank you. Page SE/2/622, please, paragraph 11. Thank you. Is that the paragraph 11 you have been reading from?

 

608.          Mr Brown: Exactly so, yes, and there are no manuscript adjustments to that at all, so that is as the minute was received by Ministers.

 

609.          Mr Campbell QC: OK. Can you read out the passage in block please, so that we can see where we were at 8 October?

 

610.          Mr Brown: The passage in block:

 

611.  “The main point is that while the capital cost budget set out in the White Paper of £40 million might just stretch by reducing quality or space standards to provide a building at Leith, it would not provide a home for the Parliament at Regent Road or Haymarket.”

 

612.          Mr Campbell QC: How on earth did you manage to reach a conclusion like that given the contents of Annex A? Annex A is at page SE/2/632.

 

613.          Mr Brown: I would have thought that that was not inconsistent with Annex A, which says that a building at Leith of 15,000 square metres, plus 3,600 square metres of secure car parking would cost between £42 million and £44 million. What we were saying to the Secretary of State was that with a bit of heaving and shoving we could probably reduce that budget to £40 million. We would have to sacrifice a little, either on space or quality standards.

 

614.          Mr Campbell QC: Perhaps you should have gone for Sheriff Court standards instead of High Court standards?

 

615.          Mr Brown: Possibly so. But, in our view, it would be very difficult to see how that budget could be made to stretch at Haymarket or at Regent Road.

 

616.          Mr Campbell QC: Putting it bluntly, Mr Brown, there must have been a recognition among officials by this time that £40 million was not achievable.

 

617.          Mr Brown: Well, I think the words that we used in paragraph 11 that you have drawn attention to make our point. What this was doing—I suggest anyway—was giving the Secretary of State an opportunity to say “Look, the £40 million that has been quoted publicly; I regard as the ceiling figure for this project; on no account go above it.” He had an opportunity here to say that we were saying that, in order to meet the emerging needs as we then understood them of the Parliament for space, and in order for building quality to be maintained, that £40 million was beginning to look unrealistic.

 

618.          Mr Campbell QC: Can I suggest, just examining this matter neutrally, that that paragraph doesn’t really set out in terms for him the opportunity to give that option. It does not ask him the question, does it, in terms whether or not he wants to stick by his White Paper budget?

 

619.          Mr Brown: That is perfectly true, yes.

 

620.          Mr Campbell QC: So what you have told me is a subtle, or a more subtle, read of this paragraph?

 

621.          Mr Brown: Yes. It certainly does not ask the Secretary of State directly the question: “Does he want all efforts to be directed towards making sure that the building cost does not exceed £40 million?” I think there is a fairly direct implication, but I fully accept that that is not the question that is asked.

 

622.          Mr Campbell QC: The referendum had taken place by this time, had it not?

 

623.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

624.          Mr Campbell QC: So as far as Mr Dewar was concerned, the snowball was beginning to roll. He had got his election result, he had got his White Paper out, he had got his referendum result. Things were coming into place, as he had anticipated them.

 

625.          Mr Brown: Yes, these are all factually correct.

 

626.          Mr Campbell QC: We must also recognise, must we not, that when the announcement was finally made, and indeed in the Second Reading debate, there was quite a ready recognition by the Secretary of State that the £40 million figure could not be adhered to?

 

627.          Mr Brown: Yes, yes, yes. I agree with all of these points that you are making. Could I also just read on to the record the qualifications that we attached to the building capital cost estimates, which appear just beneath Annex A? (SE/2/632) It says that:

 

628.  “Costs are indicative estimates only, compiled for comparative purposes. They are based on limited information and could vary for a number of reasons, including uncertainty of eventual design characteristics and quality; changes in the brief; site conditions and planning requirements.”

 

629.          You might say this is small print in Annex A following a seven-page submission, but it is important I think to note that these were the qualifications.

 

630.          Mr Campbell QC: I take that from you, and of course you are right to draw attention to it. This is a document that the Secretary of State would have seen. Does it demonstrate civil servants building into estimates the uncertainties which were present at the time?

 

631.          Mr Brown: Yes, indeed it does. Note 1, that I have just read, I think is quite helpful in setting out the range of uncertainties. There were one set of uncertainties relating to eventual design characteristics, and another set of uncertainties relating to changes in the brief, for example.

 

632.          Mr Campbell QC: Were you able to form an impression at all at this time as to whether or not it was important to the Secretary of State in presentational terms to be able to present a project which had a capped budget?

 

633.          Mr Brown: I do not feel able, really, to give any clear answer to your question. You are asking me was I able to form a view at that time of what was in the Secretary of State’s mind. To be honest, I would want to find something in a document somewhere that allowed me to cast my mind back, or to give me something on which to base casting my mind back. I have obviously read the documents that the Inquiry has before it fairly carefully. I do not find anything that gives us an indication of what the Secretary of State’s view was on that issue of budget capping.

 

634.          Mr Campbell QC: Right, OK.

 

635.          Mr Brown: I do find references in successive advice that we gave him to being able to illustrate what the effects would be of the cost rising above the £40 million. For example, I cannot put my finger on it maybe right now, but I could quite quickly, when we came to say that these architectural design feasibility studies should be undertaken by leading firms of architects. One of the reasons that we gave for doing that to the Secretary of State was that it would give an opportunity for him to see what could be achieved with a larger budget. That is recorded in the papers before the Inquiry.

 

636.          Mr Campbell QC: Yes. I am not sure that I am aware that feasibility studies were instructed with a budgetary figure in mind, were they?

 

637.          Mr Brown: I would have to check that point.

 

638.          Mr Campbell QC: Right. Perhaps we can check it with other witnesses. I said to you there were three things in this minute that I wanted to look at. If I could move on from cost, just noting as I do that paragraph 14 of the minute, page SE/2/623, also deals with running costs. The passage in bold shows that an approach has been taken to show capital and running cost estimates on a consistent basis over 20 and 60 years. Leith is cheapest, Haymarket around 20% more, and Regent Road at between 25% and 30% more expensive over 20 years. And you say there:

 

639.  “We are confident of the running cost estimates, which are largely based on detailed figuring derived from current experience.”

 

640.          What does that refer to?

 

641.          Mr Brown: The detailed figuring derived from current experience?

 

642.          Mr Campbell QC: Yes.

 

643.          Mr Brown: It refers to the fact that we were already occupying St Andrew’s House and knew how much it cost to run and maintain, and to the fact that we had recently moved into the Victoria Quay office in Leith, and knew how much it would cost to run and maintain a new building there. Haymarket is in between, obviously. The difference between Leith and Haymarket is that you consume more energy in running a building that is sealed and has mechanical air conditioning. At least, that is by far the biggest differentiator in running cost terms.

 

644.          12.45 pm

 

645.          Mr Campbell QC:  Right.  That leads us quite neatly then into the question of environmental impact, which we see at paragraph 15 here (SE/2/623). You set out the Government’s ambitions in this respect at 15.  You set out certain criteria for a new building, whether it be in an existing building or as a new build, and some of the issues which are perceived as important environmentally speaking, and then in paragraph 16 (SE/2/623 – 624) you note that transport patterns for peripheral sites would tend in the opposite direction.

 

646.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

647.          Mr Campbell QC: In page SE/2/624 you talk about the use of fossil fuels, air quality issues and transport enhancements for the city centre.

 

648.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

649.          Mr Campbell QC: And at paragraph 20 you set out pretty starkly, don’t you, the need for an EIA before a final choice is made?

 

650.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

651.          Mr Campbell QC: Did you write this paper or did you choreograph it?

 

652.          Mr Brown: I co-ordinated it.  The material at the beginning and issues like what I decided to put in bold and so on would absolutely be up to me.  However, this, of all the submissions I think before the Inquiry in the site selection set of papers, this is the one that drew most heavily on inputs from colleagues in environment and planning and transport groups, all of whom had a very important contribution to make, obviously.

 

653.          Mr Campbell QC: And in the last sentence you note the risk of criticism if there is an abandonment of sustainable development policies?

 

654.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

655.          Mr Campbell QC: Are you able to give me an impression as to whether that was a matter which impinged on the Secretary of State’s consciousness?

 

656.          Mr Brown: Yes.  It clearly did.  I think when we met him on 5 September to discuss the advice that I had provided on 4 September, he raised environmental impact — I think he probably expressed it in terms of extra car journeys — as an issue around the Leith option and asked for more information about that.  And indeed the whole business of environmental impact assessment boiled down to the choice between a city centre location, where there would be very few extra car journeys generated but where the building itself would have a larger environmental impact because it had to be air-conditioned, and the attractions of a more peripheral site like Leith where there would be many more car journeys generated but the building would be environmentally benign in the sense of being naturally ventilated.

 

657.          Mr Campbell QC: Does this submission take account of the fact that officials were already constrained to make journeys to Leith from St Andrew’s House and vice versa?

 

658.          Mr Brown: Well, it was certainly well known to us that siting the Scottish Office building at Victoria Quay had generated substantial numbers of additional car journeys, and we knew that that was an issue for environmentalists and for environmental policy.

 

659.          Mr Campbell QC: Yes, quite rightly too I would have thought.

 

660.          Mr Brown: Well indeed.

 

661.          Mr Campbell QC: Not to take time, Sir, with it, but SE/2/625 then is a discussion, is it not — page 6 of your minute — is quite a full discussion about the pros and cons of these transport issues?

 

662.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

663.          Mr Campbell QC: So again, we have at 8 October a pretty full inspection of the environmental pros and cons of these three sites. Is that clear?

 

664.          Mr Brown: Yes it is, yes.

 

665.          Mr Campbell QC: But no EIA at that time?

 

666.          Mr Brown: No, no.  I think it would be fair to say that my colleagues in Environment Group and Transport Group were very anxious that these issues be laid out for the Secretary of State so he could see the substance of them: and that would help him to agree that an environmental impact assessment should be undertaken, although as you have pointed out it was a statutory requirement in any case.

 

667.          Mr Campbell QC: Can I just take you to page SE/2/627, where you talk about the civic presence of the building, judging that it is a matter very much in the eye of the beholder.  Again, are you able to reflect the Secretary of State’s mind in understanding whether that was a matter which was important to him?

 

668.          Mr Brown: Yes.  I think we can infer that it was a matter that was important to him.  What evidence do I have for saying that?  As an example, at the meeting with him on 5 September, when we were talking for the first time about the three shortlisted options, he was interested in how a building with sufficient civic presence could be constructed at Leith, for example.  I use that as an indication of the Secretary of State’s interest in and sensitivity to this issue.  So civic presence was a factor that he was interested in.

 

669.          Mr Campbell QC: The Secretary of State quite liked working at Victoria Quay, did he not?

 

670.          Mr Brown: Well his office, of course, was always in St Andrew’s House.  At no time, as far as I recall, was the Secretary of State’s office — I stand to be corrected on this — but at no time, as far as I recall, did Mr Dewar work in Victoria Quay, although he would have visited the building from time to time for meetings.

 

671.          Mr Campbell QC: Well that was really the question. I have evidence somewhere, submitted but perhaps not yet laid before the Inquiry, that he liked to work in Leith and liked to work in Victoria Quay.  If that is not within your recollection it does not matter.

 

672.          Mr Brown: Well, I can certainly say that he was extremely sympathetic to the Leith option throughout the process, but that might imply that it was his favoured option.  I think he was very interested in all of the factors bearing on option choice.  He was also very anxious not to be prejudiced either for or against any one of the options, and he was clear from the discussions that we had with him on all of this stream of advice that was going up to him that he was extremely interested in the Leith option.

 

673.          Mr Campbell QC: Yes.  Look at paragraph 34 9SE/2/627) would you?  There you talk about timing; you say the Secretary of State continues to attach importance to having a building ready soon and if possible in time for the first meeting in spring 2000.  You conclude this paragraph by saying:

 

674.  “It goes without saying that all possible steps will be taken to shorten the timetable...Historic Scotland will do everything they can to speed the consents...a delay would of course push the completion dates back…in our view the prospects of completion by spring 2000 are diminishing…probably more realistic to think of an end-2000 occupation.”

 

675.          So you are three years and a bit away from completion at this point.  Was that a statement made on advice?   

 

676.          Mr Brown: It would have been, yes.  I would very much doubt that I would have taken it upon myself to make that estimate.  Here we are in October 1997, and we are discussing the diminishing prospects of a completed building by spring 2000, which is 30 months away.  On matters relating to potential timetabling I very much relied on Bill Armstrong, who maintained a project timeline, and indeed I think not long after this submission of the 8^th, we put advice to the Secretary of State on the timetable.  If it is of interest to the Inquiry, that was a minute that I put forward to the Secretary of State on 28 October.  And given that you have asked me about timetable, it is probably worth noting that the minute of 28 October included an Annex — Annex A — which on one page sketched out a timetable that in fact ran through to the beginning of 2001.

 

677.          Mr Campbell QC: SE/2/951, please.  Is that the one?

 

678.          Mr Brown: Yes it is.  I refer to it simply to illustrate my answer to your point that the timetable attached was, in my clear recollection, drawn up by Bill Armstrong and actually suggests that April 2001 was more realistic.  So it modifies the view expressed in my minute of 8 October.

 

679.          Mr Campbell QC: No, no.  I am just looking at it to see where we are with the selection of designers and what you anticipated by May 1998 and then start on site in April 1999, so 11 months later, leaving one year for the work up of designs.

 

680.          Mr Brown: Interestingly, the Secretary of State came right back in response to that minute of 28 October.  And another paper that I think is before the Inquiry from Kenneth Thomson, who had succeeded Michael Lugton as his Private Secretary, dated 31 October.  There is a two-liner which says:

 

681.  “The Secretary of State has seen your minute of 28 October.  He is concerned about the long wait until April 1999 before a start is made on site.”

 

682.          So he continued to press us on timetable issues.

 

683.          Mr Campbell QC: Could I go back to SE/2/627, please, paragraph 34.  We noted that you said in the last sentence there:

 

684.  “In our view, the prospects of completion of a building by spring 2000 on any site are diminishing.  It is probably more realistic to think of an end-2000 occupation.”

 

685.          Then we have some consideration…is that word jargon for your opinion, or is it simply the canvassing of arguments?

 

686.          Mr Brown: Pros and cons kind of thing, yes.

 

687.          Mr Campbell QC: You note there that Leith:

 

688.  “…would be the preferred option by a margin of 20%.”

 

689.          And at SE/2/628 you noted:

 

690.  “If he were to found on costs, his capital costs would be challenged.”

 

691.          Why did you say that?

 

692.          Mr Brown: I think it simply reflects the qualification that is recorded in Annex A that the costs were indicative estimates only and compiled for comparative purposes.  You have mentioned challenge; just at which point is that?

 

693.          Mr Campbell QC: I see it in the second line of page SE/2/628:

  694.  “…capital cost estimates would be challenged.”

 

695.          Did you mean by the nosy public or did you mean by competing developers?

 

696.          Mr Brown: I am fairly clear in my mind that what I had in mind when I wrote that was the interest that, for example, heritage groups and EDI Ltd were taking in the costs of a Regent Road option.  We were having a bit of an argument, I think it would be fair to say, with EDI at that time about the costs of the St Andrew’s House proposal, where they thought that a satisfactory scheme could be worked up for some sum considerably less than we believed was necessary.

 

697.          Mr Campbell QC: I think their figure was in the 30s, was it not?

 

698.          Mr Brown: I would have said between £20 million and £30 million, yes.

 

699.          Mr Campbell QC: And that seemed low to you, did it?

 

1.00 pm

 

700.          Mr Brown: It seemed low; it seemed like less than 50% of what we thought was necessary, and we were reinforced in our estimates by the fact that we knew the condition of St Andrew’s House intimately and we had had independent quantity surveying advice on the costs associated with the Regent Road option.

 

 

701.          Mr Campbell QC: Now, Mr Brown, we can read the rest of this minute for ourselves.

 

702.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

703.          Mr Campbell QC: But I would like to take you to paragraph 42, please, on page SE/2/629 just in conclusion here. You note there that the £40 million budget would be substantially exceeded if one of the Regent Road options was to be chosen, and then you say if you are going to choose one anyway, it makes sense to choose option one because of its estimated cost of between £80 million and £96 million because of lower running costs.

 

704.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

705.          Mr Campbell QC: You know that pressure is on the block. I dare say that has come from financial colleagues’ advice, has it?

 

706.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

707.          Mr Campbell QC: Yes. And so you say on page SE/2/630:

 

708.  “So, to put it crudely the difference between a £50 million project in Leith and a £80 million to £90 million project would have significant consequences for other Scottish Office programmes.”

 

709.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

710.  Mr Campbell QC: “The scope for reducing the costs of option 1 is pretty limited. Of course, there is always a higher risk with a major rebuild involving an existing listed building that unforeseen problems will arise, causing costs to go up.”

 

711.          Were you nudging the Secretary of State towards Leith here?

 

712.          Mr Brown: Well we were wanting to lay out the facts as clearly as we could. You could construe this as a nudge towards Leith on grounds of cost reduction or cost containment, but I hope the Inquiry would agree that it does constitute a setting out of the facts on which the Secretary of State would have to make his decision.

 

713.          Mr Campbell QC: Certainly, you have spent a lot of time in this minute examining the environmental issues which arise from Leith.

 

714.          Mr Brown: Yes.

 

715.          Mr Campbell QC: And you repeat them in paragraph 43.

 

716.          Mr Brown: Well, indeed, it is helpful to have that pointed out. Yes. Obviously in an assessment like this — and this applies to the whole process —there are factors that can be quantified, and mainly they have got pound signs in front of them.

 

717.          Mr Campbell QC: Yes.

 

718.          Mr Brown: And then there are other factors that cannot be, and certainly at that stage it was not possible to quantify environmental impact in the same way that costs could be quantified.

 

719.          Mr Campbell QC: At least not without an environmental impact assessment?

 

720.          Mr Brown: Absolutely so.

 

721.          Mr Campbell QC: And the firm recommendation in the last sentence, if it is a recommendation, is that there will be benefit in postponement?

 

722.          Mr Brown: Yes. That is correct. That was the key point.

 

723.          Mr Campbell QC: And was that your view at the time?

 

724.          Mr Brown: Yes. I have to say that it was a reluctant view, but I felt that we had absolutely no option than to make that recommendation to the Secretary of State because of the points about the EIA that you have already drawn attention to, which my colleagues in Environment Group were, you know, making sure that I understood. The reason why I say it was a reluctant view is simply that the Secretary of State remained very keen to get this business done and settled as quickly as possible, and I suppose I felt that I was a bearer of rather disappointing tidings on timescale.

 

725.          Lord Fraser: I have just one question on that. My impression, Mr Brown, up to this point is that you and your colleagues had undertaken a necessarily lengthy but fastidious analysis of three sites, and that is in rather sharp contradistinction to the way the Holyrood site comes within consideration.

 

726.          Mr Brown: Well, there is quite a lot in that issue, Lord Fraser, and I suppose we will have an opportunity to consider that further. I will certainly be prepared to answer all the questions that I can.

 

727.          Lord Fraser: If you would, please.

 

728.          Mr Campbell QC: You have stolen my curtain raiser for after lunch. You might ask Mr Brown if he will be good enough to come back after lunch.

 

729.          Mr Brown: Yes, I will.

 

Hearing adjourned at 1.04pm.