The Fraser inquiry into the Scottish parliament fiasco has found a series of fundamental errors and failures in the project.

The final project was completed three years late and nearly 11 times over budget.

In his 267-page report Lord Fraser detailed 10 recommendations to avoid a repeat of the £430 million building fiasco.

In a wide-ranging report the Tory peer said "there is no single villain of the piece" but raises questions about the conduct of civil servants, MSPs, architects and the late first minister Donald Dewar.

The former head of the civil service in Scotland, Sir Muir Russell, came in for strong criticism.

"Clearly the top man was Sir Muir Russell - there was a number of very sharp criticisms made of him in the Scottish parliament, and I respectfully adopt their recommendations," said Lord Fraser.

John Elvidge, Sir Muir's successor as permanent secretary, responded: "Lord Fraser has confirmed previous findings by the auditor general that there were points in the process at which civil servants fell short of the standards which we expect of ourselves and which ministers and the public are entitled to expect of us."

Whilst he rejected claims that Dewar misled MSPs, Lord Fraser raises questions about the decisions he took in the early stages of the development.

The former Lord Advocate said Dewar, then Scottish secretary, was "determined to provide a site and a building for the new parliament as soon as possible".

"The timetable for construction dictated the adoption of a 'fast track' procurement method entailing relatively high risk," said the report.

"The decision to adopt construction management was taken without an adequate evaluation or understanding of the extent of risk involved and without being referred to ministers."

First minister Jack McConnell accepted Lord Fraser's findings in full and promised to overhaul the civil service in Scotland.

"The purpose of this inquiry was to look forward as well as to investigate past decisions," he said.

"Our duty and our responsibility is to make sure that this never happens again.

"I accept lord Fraser's recommendations in full. We will ensure that those which can be implemented by our government will happen."

Civil servants under fire

Civil servants involved in the tendering process for construction came under heavy fire in the long-awaited report.

The failure to examine an alternative to direct funding, such as a PFI project, was the point "when the wheels began to fall off the wagon".

"The selection of construction management was the single factor to which most of the misfortunes that have befallen the project can be attributed," concluded Lord Fraser.

That led the inquiry to deliver a "highly critical" assessment of the conduct of civil servants Barbara Doig and William Armstrong.

Doig, who took the controversial decision to readmit Bovis to the tendering process, comes in for particular criticism.

The inquiry concluded that Doig decided to ignore official advice and "proceed on the basis of informal considerations".

"She was unable to provide me with any satisfactory reason for her selection of Bovis to be readmitted to the process. It did not occur to her that there might be legal considerations," added Lord Fraser.

The report went on to conclude that "virtually none of the key questions about construction management were asked".

"It is evident that the Scottish Office, while working to publicly declared fixed budgets and being highly 'risk averse', was preparing to follow a procurement route for which there could be no fixed budget and a high degree of risk would rest with the client."

True costs

In a damning conclusion, Lord Fraser said that the figure of between £40 and £50 million originally put before the Scottish public was "never going to be sufficient to secure the construction of a new parliament building of original and innovative design".

And the report said the desire to have "quality over cost" meant that the final bill for the building was always destined to be far higher.

Lord Fraser laid the blame for the cost and time overruns with Dewar, civil servants and the Scottish parliament rather than the late architect Enric Miralles.

"Tempting as it is to lay all the blame at the door of a deceased wayward Spanish architectural genius, his stylised fashion of working and the strained relationship between his widow and RMJM in Edinburgh, the analysis of the Auditor General is unimpeachable," concluded the inquiry.

"Costs rose because the client [first the secretary of state and latterly the parliament] wanted increases and changes or at least approved of them in one manifestation or another."

Dewar's role

Dewar was criticised for the speed with which the Holyrood site was chosen.

"If he had so chosen, Donald Dewar could have proceeded in a more leisurely fashion with the selection of a site for the Scottish parliament without putting the government’s devolution proposals in their entirety at risk," he said.

However the report rejects claims that the late first minister colluded to ensure the Holyrood site was chosen as the location of the new parliament.

"There was no evidence before the Inquiry to suggest any covert arrangement between Donald Dewar and Scottish & Newcastle nor that Donald Dewar had reached an early conclusion favouring Holyrood before its candidacy was announced," noted the report.

"There was hostility in Edinburgh to the parliament being located anywhere other than centrally, thus eliminating Leith. Against this background the selection of Holyrood was obvious."

Lord Fraser also concluded that civil servants were not primed to ensure the project remained on budget.

"As events unfolded it appears to me that they understood their task to be one of trying to achieve early delivery of the new parliament building, whilst maintaining quality," he said.

"In my opinion that meant inevitably that whatever lip-service was paid to it, the cost of the building took a back seat."

Dismay

In his report, Lord Fraser also detailed his "dismay" at the BBC's decision not to give him unrestricted access to footage of interviews with Dewar and Miralles which is to be shown in a documentary on the Holyrood project.

"All I wanted was access to tapes to be shown to the public at some point in the future to allow me to be confident that no stone had been left unturned and that there had been no contradiction on tape, from the late Donald Dewar or the late Enric Miralles or other primary players which would cause me to reconsider the conclusions of this report," he noted.

"I am bound to say that I remain nevertheless doubtful whether anything relevant to the inquiry will be revealed in 'The Gathering Place' beyond that already before the inquiry."

Response

Opposition MSPs are expected to criticise both Dewar and senior civil servants during a full day debate on the findings of Lord Fraser's inquiry.

Responding to the finding's the SNP's Fergus Ewing said the report was "a solid piece of work".

"One message stands out from this report; the decisions made by Ministers and civil servants in the early days of devolution left the taxpayer wide open to the massive cost increases that then followed," he said.

“The report concludes that speed was given priority over cost; that the choice of construction management was made without any understanding of the risk of delays and that ministers failed to ask key questions over cost. That is damning criticism."

Scottish Socialist Party leader Tommy Sheridan said many questions remained unanswered.
 
"It does not answer two main questions that the Scottish public will have about the new parliament building," he said.

"Someone made a fortune from this project - who was it and who let them get away with it?"