Emergency Question: Carillion

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 1:42 pm on 16 January 2018.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:42, 16 January 2018

Well, I fully appreciate the points that Janet Finch-Saunders has made. Carillion was contracted in the design phase only, so far, of junctions 15 and 16 of the A55, and there would have been about 12 months of that design work still to go. The Welsh Government will look to see whether there are ways in which we can respond to these difficulties in a way that does not lead to that timetable being elongated. These are very early days, but, just to give her an example of the sort of actions we will look to explore, there are subcontractors in that contract actually carrying out the work. Maybe it will be possible for one of those subcontractors to become the main contractor, to carry on that work and to complete the important developments at that junction, which I know matter to her constituents and to others who use that part of the A55, without further delay.

Llywydd, I ought to apologise to Russell George for failing to have answered the first part of his question. If I could very briefly say to him, there are two other contracts that we have. There is the contract at the Llanddewi Brefi section of the A40, where the design phase is more or less complete and where we will now have to think about how we take forward the second phase of a three-phase contract. Then there was section 3 of the A465, which has been completed, which is already open, where there is a small-scale landscape contract that would have lasted for five years with Carillion beyond the opening of that section 3 of the Heads of the Valleys road. We're halfway through that five-year period. We will now have to find another way of fulfilling the remaining two and a half years. But that is the full extent of the exposure of the Welsh Government to Carillion in the contracts that the Member mentioned.