Only one bidder for £300m Scots motorway contract

Published on Tuesday 10 October 2006 01:50

THE £300 million contract to build the controversial M74 extension in Glasgow has attracted only one bidder, it emerged yesterday.

A consortium of the building firms Balfour Beatty, Morgan Est, Morrison Construction and Sir Robert McAlpine is the only one to have expressed an interest in building the five-mile road.

The contract accounts for the lion's share of the 500 million project, which is Scotland's biggest current roads scheme.

Opponents who failed in a court bid to halt the project described the news as "a sad day in the discredited history of this white elephant of a road".

Transport Scotland said the tender from the consortium, which calls itself Interlink M74 Joint Venture, would be compared against a "robust cost estimate that reflects current industry rates and prices" to ensure it represented value for money.

But David Spaven, who chairs the sustainable transport campaign group TRANSform Scotland, said: "The independent inquiry reporter threw out the economic case for the M74, and he supported our environmental arguments against the road."

The project to extend the M74 to south of the Kingston Bridge by 2010 is aimed at diverting through traffic travelling between the south and west of Glasgow away from the busy M8.