Originally from Carlisle, Graham Simpson worked as a journalist, in 1990 joining The Scottish Sun in Glasgow. He was an elected member of South Lanarkshire Council before joining the Scottish Parliament in 2016 as a Conservative list member for the Central Scotland Region. His Party's spokesman on housing and then transport, he has a wealth of experience on Holyrood committees including those dealing with walking and cycling, buses, aviation, life sciences, architecture and beer & pubs. On behalf of Transform Scotland, he chairs the Cross Party Group on Sustainable Transport.
What Graham most enjoys about being an MSP is the opportunity to engage with a variety of interesting people while remaining rooted in his community - he still lives in the ward that he represented on South Lanarkshire Council. Transport has its challenges - currently one might most immediately think of ferries - but also its opportunities, where he is impressed by the potential of hydrogen, especially if we could get into manufacturing it.
The time has not been right for him to invest in an electric car owing to their limited range and the scarcity of charging points, however the theme that now unites all aspects of transport and logistics is the need to make them greener.
Graham serves on the Public Audit Committee which investigates any subject that the Auditor-General chooses, so is always conscious of the importance of value for money. However we must make public transport easier and cheaper if we are to get people out of cars. Ireland has the multimodal Leap Card, why cannot we have that in Scotland, where many areas in suburbia as well as the countryside seem to lack a decent public transport system? It is a struggle to find out what we have in terms of railfreight movements, so how are we going to get freight off the roads and onto trains? Ferries pose huge issues associated with the need to renew the ageing fleet.
Graham is a strong supporter of light rail, and the Clyde Metro concept holds out hope for the future but may take a quarter-century to deliver a network upgrade embracing trams and other improvements. Meanwhile the railway to East Kilbride is being electrified, but will remain partly single-track. The challenge is to get the Scottish Government to invest, and buses can achieve improvements more quickly, but the Glasgow Bus Partnership had just had the rug pulled from under it by the recent Scottish Budget which had axed the Bus Partnership Fund. He would be speaking in the Budget debate, and saw no sense in the Cabinet Secretary's advice that SPT should look at its reserves, which largely were already accounted for. He noted Light Rail UK's concern that of the evidence submitted to the Cross Party Group on aspects of air-quality including non-exhaust emissions and particulates, only the latter had found a mention in the final report.
Graham was keen to know more about freight hubs, and had met the operator of an express logistics service from Mossend to Birmingham. He would be keen to talk more to innovative hauliers such as Andrew Malcolm. People in transport and logistics struck him as very passionate and committed, those promoting active travel being perhaps more vocal than the logistics folk who were more inclined to get on with the job. He noted that while event-promoters might strive to make their own operations as environmentally friendly as possible, their efforts tended to be overwhelmed by the behaviour of spectators going to and from the event, which was difficult because of the private car's undoubted convenience. An evening spent with the British Transport Police at Glasgow Central Station had shown him their professionalism in the management of large crowds, and he acknowledged that there could perhaps be scope for locating new stadia close to public transport nodes.
On ferries the only way forward was to invest in new vessels, which could be painfully slow especially if proper account was to be taken of environmental credentials - Liquefied Natural Gas was not green since it contained methane. On local deliveries the Cross Party Group had picked up on the application of e-bikes for covering the last mile. In terms of the place of all this in policy-making, transport now found itself grouped at Cabinet level with net zero and the economy, whereas logistics really belonged with business, because an efficient distribution system was the backbone of its operation.
Report by John Yellowlees.
The CILT Logo is a registered trademark of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport
Unless otherwise stated, site and contents © John G. Fender 1997 - 2026. All rights reserved.
Site designed & maintained by John G. Fender, Bsc., FCILT
