Difficult conditions

I don’t think many people will have failed to notice that the weather has been rather inclement. Or as a senior police officer at Strathclyde said; “unprecedented”. There is a ready debate as to whether it has been the worst weather since 1993 or since 1963, but no debate that it has been bad.

That has meant that my investment in a 4x4 in spring this year has definitely paid off. With the help of a neighbouring farmer my wife was able to open up our track down to the house and communication with the outside world restored – albeit with care.

For those of us who live in a rural setting a degree of self-sufficiency and mutual aid is a normal way of life. As yet, the snow fall at home – about 2 feet – is well short of last winter. But many of our old folk have needed a helping hand and I’ve been heartened to see many people doing just that – keeping an eye out, clearing the path, doing the messages.

As a Minister – or as you will now all know, former Minister – in the Government, the weather has been a pretty full-time pre-occupation. I have attended 15 meetings of the Cabinet Sub-Committee on Resilience to discuss the bad weather in the last few weeks and many other meetings forbye. I have also worked with three UK Ministers to co-ordinate action – in particular to get relaxation of drivers’ hours restrictions.

But back to that word “unprecedented”.

On Sunday when we received the forecast at 4 p.m., it said there would be snow in the central belt of Scotland – 2 to 5 centimetres generally, up to 10 cm on the hills.

We sent out the gritters to prepare. And indeed they went out many times overnight.

Later in the evening the forecast was updated but the necessary preparations indicated by that forecast remained the same – and continued.

At 8 a.m. on Monday morning there was still no suggestion that the depth of snow fall would be of the 20 cm depth that areas in the central belt – definitely not “on hills” – actually received.

But at 10:41 a.m. the first confirmation that the snowfall was much greater than expected came in. Too late to pre-emptively close our main roads and prevent an almighty snarl up. Indeed so unexpected, so unforecast, was the snowfall that BBC reporters were going out on routine assignments with no expectation of such a fall. The same BBC that later complained that the Government had not been listening to their forecasts.

But don’t let’s kick the forecasters too hard. It is not an exact science and cannot be. It is a statistically, a mathematically, derived prediction with inbuilt margins of error. Too often by the time it reaches your TV it assumed an entirely false sense of absolute certainty that cannot be true.

Now there are many lessons we can all learn, particularly regarding communication. People who have been caught up in such conditions want to know what is being done to help them and just as importantly, what will be done to improve future responses to extreme weather. It is an area where I believe I could have done better and that is why I offered the First Minister my resignation on Thursday evening.

While I am saddened to have left the Scottish Government, I am immensely proud to have had the opportunity to serve as a minister in the first ever SNP Government. I am now looking forward to a bit more time in the North East and bit less time with the BBC.