The Scottish executive has played down the extent of any errors made in its handling of the contract for the new Edinburgh parliament building.

Laura Dunlop QC, counsel for the Scottish executive, was on Tuesday making a closing submission to Lord Fraser's Holyrood inquiry.

Dunlop pointed out that the executive was not in existence when key decisions were taken at the start of the project.

She insisted that the site selection process had been "carried out with care" and the site itself had faced detailed scrutiny.

"No witness has identified any feature of the Holyrood site that ought to have been highlighted at that time and was not," she said.

"More importantly... there is no evidence that any aspect of the construction of the new buildings at Holyrood has been more expensive than it would have been if those buildings had been constructed on one of the other new build sites."

Costs

However, as work on the new parliament building began, costs escalated from an estimated £109 million in 1999 to £430 million by March of this year.

The executive's QC accepted that the handling of the original bidding process - which resulted in the selection of a design by Spanish architect Enric Miralles - could have been improved.

She said "there were failures" in the competition stages, which should have been better documented and structured.

All five bids should have been opened and examined, she added, although this would probably not have made any difference to outcome of design competition.

Dunlop went on to argue that the initial structure for managing the project had "reflected good practice".

But she accepted that the executive would look at further ways to improve the awareness of civil servants on EU procurement rules.