By Steve Bargeton, political editor

THE MSPs in charge of the Holyrood project were kept in the dark as costs rocketed and the scheme spun out of control.

Angus MSP Andrew Welsh, who has been a member of the Corporate Body since the Parliament was created, told the Fraser Inquiry yesterday of his relief at being able to speak out publicly for the first time after years of anger and frustration.

Mr Welsh, who ironically ousted Lord Fraser in 1987 as the Tory MP for Angus, accused senior civil servants of failing to provide him and his colleagues with the information they needed.

During one meeting he described a bizarre “Dutch auction” during which he and fellow MSPs tried to guess the true cost of the project while project sponsor Barbara Doig sat silent.

He said with daily reports of problems with the size of the building, the design, planning permission, pressure for extra facilities and other difficulties, he and his colleagues knew the budget of £109 million was wrong.

“For me this came to a head when I asked Barbara Doig if she could guarantee a final cost of £110 million which was greeted with silence,” he told the inquiry.

“The then deputy presiding officer, George Reid, raised this to £120 million again to be greeted by silence and I continued the Dutch auction.

“We reached £160 million at which point an outside, independent source of advice was absolutely necessary.”

Mr Welsh maintained that the Corporate Body was “chasing a moving target”.

“Our decisions were only as good as the information supplied to us,” he said. “We relied on the project team and especially on Barbara Doig as the project team director and the main conduit for information on events on and off site.”

Mr Welsh told the inquiry that in August 1999 the project team and the cost consultants held a “disaster meeting” at which it as revealed that the project was behind schedule and that the construction budget of £62 million had almost doubled to £115 million.

Incredibly, not only was the Corporate Body—the client for the project—not invited to the meeting, they were not even informed of the shocking information revealed at it.

“This is crucial information that the Corporate Body should have been told about and if we had been it would have meant that we would have had a duty to inform Parliament,” he said. “A credibility gap had opened up. The Corporate Body didn’t even know that this meeting existed.”

Mr Welsh said he and his colleagues pressed for accurate figures to report to MSPs, but eventually received only a range of costs based on different calculation methods.

Asked by counsel for the inquiry John Campbell QC how he felt about that, Mr Welsh replied, “Livid, is the word I would use... This was going on since August.”

Earlier this week the inquiry saw a letter from Mrs Doig to Parliament chief executive Paul Grice describing Mr Welsh and his colleagues on the Corporate Body as “unwilling to devote the time, unwilling to receive information” and having “patchy attendance” at crucial meetings.

In the letter she wrote, “I am concerned that, despite the best efforts of staff, Scottish Parliament Corporate Body members are not performing at the level required for Scotland’s most prestigious public building.”

Asked to respond to this criticism Mr Welsh said these opinions were never made known to the Corporate Body by Mrs Doig or Mr Grice. “If she felt we weren’t understanding then it was surely her duty to make sure we understood and if she thought we were too thick to understand it was her duty to explain to us where exactly she thought we were getting it wrong,” he said. “She was the project manager. She wasn’t an ordinary timid civil servant.”

On the question of attendance at meetings, he said he was at 38 of 39 which discussed the Holyrood project. Mr Welsh said the only colleague who missed some was Tory John Young—whose wife was dying—and he called on Mrs Doig to withdraw her remark.