The motivation for the inquiry back in 2006 was a petition from the Road Haulage Association, which considered that the Scottish road haulage industry was subject to increased foreign competition. The RHA said that that competition was unfair, because foreign hauliers were moving into the United Kingdom with fuel that they had bought outside the country. The committee addressed that big issue. However, not a great deal could be done, because many of the powers resided in Westminster rather than here in the Scottish Parliament.
A question that we could ask is the extent to which the Scottish haulage industry today is vulnerable to competition from foreign hauliers. It is still possible for hauliers to fill their tanks outside the country, and come into Scotland and operate here with lower costs. However, in the meantime, the heavy goods vehicle levy—a Westminster-driven directive—has been imposed to try to level the fiscal playing field, if you like, between UK hauliers and those externally. That big issue was well debated at the time. As I said, nothing much happened because the powers resided elsewhere.
I think that there were 50 recommendations in the 2006 report; I will not go through them all and say whether they have been implemented. In many cases, it is hard to know whether they were implemented because they involved asking the Scottish Government to conduct a study or to audit, and one does not know whether that was done internally.
A few things have happened that, I suppose, were recommended. The increase in the speed limit for trucks on the A9 was a recommendation. Concern was expressed about the state of the Forth road bridge. The report did not ask for a second Forth road crossing, although one is being constructed.
Other recommendations were made, but it is hard to judge whether they have been implemented. I will list a few of them. It was suggested that bridges in the Highlands should be strengthened to accommodate 44 tonne lorries. There were many restrictions on the movement of heavy trucks in the Highlands because the bridges had not been checked and strengthened to accommodate them.
It was also suggested that there should be an investigation of the case for night-time delivery in urban areas. As far as I know that has not happened, although initiatives south of the border have looked at the potential for night-time delivery to shops in urban areas.
There was also support for the Rosyth to Zeebrugge ferry. Some of the recommendations have been overtaken by events. I am sure that the committee is well aware that the sulphur emission control areas regulations have imposed tighter environmental restrictions on short-sea shipping. That has made the operation of the Rosyth ferry a bit more precarious, although the Scottish Government has come in and provided financial assistance, which makes the service viable again.
Another recommendation by the committee was that more use be made of long-distance rail freight services between Scotland and the European mainland through the Channel tunnel. Regrettably, I do not think that that has happened. If we compare the total number of freight trains going through the Channel tunnel with what it was in 2006, about a quarter fewer are using it now than there were then. I do not know how many of those journeys started or ended in Scotland, but less use is being made of the Channel tunnel today than before.
There was a recommendation that freight facilities grants be encouraged to shift more freight from road to rail. Scotland continues to make those grants available, unlike the Government south of the border, but I understand that relatively few awards are made. In the meantime, the methodology that is used to award the grants has changed.
The committee was keen to see an overall shift in freight from road to rail and water. In the 2012 study that Maja Piecyk and I compiled for the Freight Transport Association, which has been submitted as evidence to the inquiry, we showed how the freight modal split had changed, and it did not change very much in that time. The freight market in Scotland is still overwhelmingly dominated by road transport and there has been only a marginal shift to rail.
We tend to measure the allocation of freight between transport modes in weight terms. Some of the traffic that the railways have recently secured is of low-density freight that does not necessarily account for a lot of tonnes but which takes up quite a bit of volume on the trucks and trains. The lighter retail traffic that the railways have secured is lucrative for the railways and is something to be encouraged, but it does not add all that many tonnes to the rail network in comparison with, for example, coal or other primary products.
I could go on, but I do not want to bore you with all these details. Those were some indications of the changes that have occurred during the past nine years or so.