Scotland's Scotch Whisky Industry Stares Down a Road to Nowhere
The dram in your glass traveled a long way to reach you — not just in years of maturation, but in actual miles of Scottish road, often crumbling single-lane carriageways threading through the Highlands between some of the world's most storied distilleries and the markets that consume their product. That journey, GMB Scotland is now arguing loudly, is being needlessly prolonged and endangered by a political class that has talked a big game on infrastructure while delivering little of substance. The union's message, delivered at its annual Congress in Blackpool on June 8, 2026, was unambiguous: the failure to properly connect the Scottish Highlands to the rest of the country is not merely an inconvenience — it is a self-inflicted wound on one of the UK's most valuable export industries.
A Seven-Billion-Pound Industry Running on Rutted Roads
GMB Scotland cited Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) data estimating the Scotch whisky industry is worth £7 billion — roughly US$9.33 billion — to the UK economy. That figure deserves to sit with you for a moment. In a post-Brexit Britain still negotiating its economic identity, Scotch whisky remains one of the country's most dependable export earners, a globally recognized luxury product that competes at the very top tier of the spirits market worldwide. And yet the roads that carry its raw materials in and its finished product out are, by multiple accounts, dangerously inadequate for the scale of the operation they are supposed to support.
The union believes the Scotch whisky sector supports around 11,000 jobs in the Highlands alone, and that around two million tourists visit Scotland's distilleries annually. Those tourists — many of them American, making the pilgrimage to Speyside, Islay, or the Isle of Skye — also depend on those same roads, ferries, and rail lines. When those connections fray, the entire ecosystem that has been built around Scotch whisky suffers, from the distillery workers filling casks at Glenfiddich and Lagavulin to the bed-and-breakfast owners in Dufftown who count on whisky tourism to keep their lights on between October and April.
The rural nature of the Highlands and Islands results in the majority of goods and materials associated with operational activities being transported by road, with a limited number of route choices available for certain movements — making the resilience of the road network vital to the industry's efficient operation. This is not a problem that can be solved by rerouting trucks onto alternate highways. In many parts of the Highlands, there is no alternate highway. There is one road, and it needs to work.
The A9: A Decade of Delays on Scotland's Most Important Corridor
The centerpiece of GMB Scotland's grievance is the A9, the trunk road that connects Perth to Inverness and serves as the primary commercial artery feeding the Highland whisky economy. The union told delegates it has taken more than a decade to dual just 11 miles of the A9 — the busiest and most important road to the Highlands — with estimates suggesting the work may not be completed for another ten years. Read that again: over a decade of construction, and the project isn't even halfway done. Trucks hauling spirit northward and finished whisky southward have been navigating the same unsafe, single-carriageway bottlenecks that existed when the dualling programme was first promised.
The union's motion read: "That is not only a national embarrassment but an epic act of economic self-harm." It is difficult to argue with the characterization. The A9 runs through some of the most whisky-dense geography in Scotland, skirting the edges of Speyside — home to more distilleries per square mile than anywhere else on earth — and providing the main route for the constant flow of tankers, lorries, and supply vehicles that keep those operations running. Every delay, every accident on a dangerous passing section, every road closure due to weather on an undivided carriageway adds friction and cost to an industry that already faces significant headwinds from global tariff pressures and shifting consumer trends.
The Programme's Troubled History
The A9 Dualling Programme is currently one of Scotland's largest and most significant transport infrastructure projects, aiming to upgrade 133.5km of the A9 trunk road between Perth and Inverness to dual carriageway — a programme divided into 11 distinct sections for a phased rollout, with works dating back a decade. The project's history reads like a case study in how not to deliver major infrastructure. Its chequered history led the Civil Engineering Contractors Association (CECA) for Scotland chief executive Grahame Barn to brand Transport Scotland as the "worst" client body to work for in the UK in 2023, due to lengthy delays on the project.
The Scottish Government revamped its A9 dualling programme after discovering that the option to privately finance some sections was too expensive, and the SNP has been under serious pressure since Jenny Gilruth confirmed in February 2023 that the A9 dualling was "unachievable" by 2025. That admission was a significant political moment — it confirmed what critics had long suspected: that the original timeline was aspirational at best and irresponsible at worst. For the whisky industry, which operates on decade-long production cycles and requires absolute logistical consistency, "aspirational" timelines from government are no substitute for actual tarmac.
By the end of 2030, 50% of the A9 will be dualled, rising to 67% by the end of 2032, 91% by the end of 2034, and 100% by the end of 2035 — at an estimated total scheme cost of £3.97 billion at April 2025 prices. That's nearly £4 billion to complete a road project that has already consumed the better part of fifteen years in planning and partial construction. To put that in perspective against the industry it serves, that is more than half the annual economic contribution of the entire Scotch whisky sector.
What's Actually Being Built Right Now
As of early 2026, works are active on sections at both the southern and northern ends of the route. The 9.6km Tomatin to Moy section is under major construction by contractor Balfour Beatty, with works having started in May 2025. Construction of the Tay Crossing to Ballinluig section by Wills Bros commenced in November, while the 6.4km Pitlochry to Killiecrankie section is currently in its procurement phase, worth £205 million, with three contractors — Balfour Beatty, Kier Transportation, and Wills Bros Civil Engineering — shortlisted.
Almost £2 billion will be spent to dual the remaining single carriageway sections of the A9 between Perth and Inverness after the government invited contractors to tender — Transport Scotland has published a £1.94 billion Contract Notice inviting contractors to bid for a new framework agreement to deliver the remaining 58 miles that are yet to begin the procurement process. Construction crews are on the ground, progress is happening, but for the workers and businesses that depend on this road today, the timeline remains frustratingly distant. A distillery manager in Kingussie doesn't need a fully dualled A9 by 2035; he needs a safer road this winter when ice makes overtaking on a single carriageway a deadly gamble.
The Union's Call to Action: Roads, Rails, and Ferries
GMB Scotland called on the Scottish and UK governments to improve road, rail, and sea connections across the north of Scotland at its annual Congress in Blackpool on June 8. The breadth of that demand — road, rail, and sea — is telling. The transport problem facing the whisky industry is not reducible to a single failing highway. It is systemic. Ferries are used to support the operation of island-based distilleries in the Highlands and Islands, and almost all of the materials needed to support the industry on the islands are transported by ferry. Anyone who has ever tried to get a cask of Laphroaig off Islay or a delivery of barley onto Orkney will understand that ferry reliability is not an abstract policy concern — it is an operational lifeline.
Louise Gilmour, GMB Scotland secretary, called on the Scottish and UK governments to improve road, rail, and sea connections across the area during the union's annual congress in Blackpool. Her arguments were rooted in economics rather than sentiment. "Efficient, reliable transport links across the region can no longer be treated as an aspiration by ministers but an economic necessity," she said. The choice of words matters: aspiration versus necessity. For too long, the political conversation around Highland infrastructure has treated good roads and reliable ferries as a nice-to-have rather than an existential requirement for the communities and industries that depend on them.
Gilmour stated before the debate: "The Highlands are famous for many things but, economically, few are more important than whisky. It generates billions of pounds for the UK economy each year while millions of tourists visit our famous distilleries. The industry is one of Scotland's greatest success stories and does not exist in isolation, but rests on good roads and reliable ferries."
That last phrase — "does not exist in isolation" — is the crux of the argument. Scotch whisky is not made in a vacuum. It requires a continuous, functioning supply chain that begins with barley fields and ends in export containers at major ports. Every link in that chain depends on transport infrastructure, and every weak link in the infrastructure chain costs the industry real money.
Communities Paying the Price for Political Neglect
GMB Scotland warned that the slow progress in dualling the main road from Perth to Inverness exposes a far wider failure to protect and improve transport links in the Highlands and islands that is risking jobs and communities. The language of "risk" here is not hyperbole. When a distillery cannot get its product to market efficiently, or when a haulier won't take a contract because the road conditions make delivery economics unfeasible, those are real employment consequences rippling through Highland communities that have few alternative economic engines to fall back on.
"When those connections are underfunded or unreliable, it is workers, their families and their communities that pay the price," Gilmour continued. This is the human dimension of what is otherwise often framed as an infrastructure policy debate. The distillery worker in Aviemore, the cooper in Craigellachie, the delivery driver navigating the single-lane A9 in winter — these are the people absorbing the cost of political inaction in the most tangible way possible.
Essential industries underpinning the Highland and UK economy, including whisky and tourism, are being sabotaged by under-investment and neglect, according to the union. The word "sabotaged" is deliberately provocative, but it carries weight. Sabotage implies an active harm being done, not merely a passive failure, and GMB Scotland's position is that allowing infrastructure to deteriorate while promising improvement is itself a form of action — one with predictable, damaging consequences.
The union said that improved connectivity would not only strengthen and reassure existing industries but also help attract new investment to rural areas that have historically struggled to benefit from national economic growth, and that the approved motion concluded that without urgent action, Scotland risked undermining some of its most successful global industries through what it describes as "avoidable and long-standing political neglect."
The Logistics Reality Behind the Spirit in the Glass
To understand why transport infrastructure matters so fundamentally to Scotch whisky, it helps to trace the full supply chain. There are a total of 99 distilleries currently operational in the Highlands and Islands as of October 2023, with the operation of these supported by a network of facilities and suppliers. Each of those distilleries requires regular deliveries of barley, water treatment chemicals, yeast, fuel, and cooperage materials. Most of the spirit they produce does not stay local — most spirit is transported to large blending and bottling facilities located in central Scotland.
Once distilled, spirit must mature in oak casks in Scotland for a minimum of three years, and while some spirit is matured in warehouses adjacent to distilleries, most is filled into tankers and transported to maturation facilities elsewhere. That constant movement of new-make spirit in tankers, of filled casks in specialist trailers, of finished whisky in containers — all of it runs over roads that GMB Scotland is arguing have been chronically underserved by public investment.
Transport links to facilities in other parts of Scotland are essential for the production of Scotch whisky, and the rural locations of the distilleries result in the majority of goods and product being transported to and from the sites by road, with some requiring specialized trailers. The geography is simply not amenable to alternatives. Rail freight has been trialed: a trial was undertaken in 2013, in association with HITRANS, to review the potential for a proportion of spirit to be transported from the goods yard at Elgin to Grangemouth Rail Freight Terminal, but while the trial lasted for a number of months, no rail freight company has come forward with a service offering since. That failed rail freight experiment is itself an indictment of how difficult it has proven to build alternatives to road transport in this region.
What the Broader Industry Has Learned About Supply Chain Fragility
The whisky industry has grappled with transport vulnerability before, though usually in the context of global logistics. Haulage and shipping have been subject to delays and additional costs, whichever way transport is managed. The post-pandemic and post-Brexit period exposed just how brittle whisky's supply chain could be when external pressures mounted simultaneously. "Bourbon barrels are shipped via Rotterdam or Antwerp," noted one industry observer, "and can remain on the docks until another ship has space to bring them to Grangemouth, which can mean a two-week delay." When upstream delays in getting casks are compounded by downstream delays getting finished spirit to bottling plants, the cumulative effect on production planning can be severe.
The domestic infrastructure problem that GMB Scotland is raising is, in some ways, more fundamental than those global logistics headaches — because it is entirely within the control of elected governments to fix. Unlike container shipping rates or global port congestion, the state of the A9 is a purely domestic policy choice. Money has been allocated, promises have been made, and yet the road remains unfinished, dangerous in stretches, and inadequate for the commercial demands placed upon it.
Tourism: Two Million Visitors Who Also Need a Working Road
Around two million tourists visit Scotland's distilleries annually, making whisky tourism one of the country's most significant attractions. These visitors — a significant proportion of them American travelers making bucket-list pilgrimages to Scotch country — are not just consumers of whisky; they are economic multipliers. They fill hotel rooms, eat in local restaurants, hire local guides, and carry home bottles that become social currency back in the States. The distillery visitor experience has grown into a serious business in its own right, and it is entirely dependent on accessible, safe transport links.
The union argued that poor transport links are hampering tourism in the Highlands alongside the core production industries. The logic is straightforward: a traveler who reads about unpredictable ferry services to Islay or who knows the A9 is a single-lane road with an alarming accident record is a traveler who may choose a whisky tourism destination elsewhere — Kentucky, perhaps, or Ireland, both of which have made serious investments in making their distillery regions more accessible.
Political Accountability and What Comes Next
The Scottish Government, to its credit, is not entirely ignoring the problem. Scotland's Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop MSP announced the Scottish Government's 2026 Delivery Plan for the A9 Dualling Programme, confirming the remaining sections will be delivered using capital funding, with the Scottish Government fully committed to delivering A9 dualling by the end of 2035. That commitment, however, is now the third or fourth such commitment made over the project's history, each time with a revised and extended deadline. The industry can be forgiven for treating 2035 as another aspiration rather than a guaranteed delivery date.
The multi-billion investment to dual the A9 involves construction of over 130 new structures, over 300 utility diversions, and moving approximately 20 million cubic meters of earthworks — equivalent to 8,000 Olympic swimming pools' worth of material. The scale of the engineering challenge is genuine and should not be minimized. But that scale was knowable from the start, and the failure to resource and manage the programme accordingly over more than a decade is the core of GMB Scotland's complaint.
GMB, one of the biggest unions in the whisky industry, said communities in the Highlands and islands have been failed by years of under-investment and predicted better transport links would protect existing jobs while bringing new employers to the region. That second point — attracting new employers — is worth dwelling on. The Highlands is not doomed to have only one major industry. Better infrastructure opens the door to diversification in food and drink manufacturing, renewable energy, and technology-enabled industries that don't require physical proximity to major cities if the digital and physical connectivity is in place. But that diversification cannot begin until the basic infrastructure foundations are laid.
"Communities and businesses across the Highlands and islands, including all our members working in the whisky industry across the region, deserve more than empty promises and platitudes," Gilmour's motion concluded. It is a sentiment that cuts across partisan lines and speaks to something fundamental about the relationship between government investment and economic potential. The Scotch whisky industry is not asking for a handout; it is asking for the basic infrastructure that would allow it to continue generating billions of pounds for the national economy without fighting its own country's road network to do it.
The Bigger Picture: What America's Bourbon Country Knows That Scotland Doesn't
There is a useful comparison to be drawn here. Kentucky's bourbon industry, which competes directly with Scotch on the global stage, has benefited enormously from deliberate state and federal investment in the transportation corridors that serve the Bluegrass State's distillery belt. The Kentucky Bourbon Trail — a tourism and economic development initiative — is supported not just by marketing dollars but by the kind of road infrastructure investment that makes actually getting to a Bardstown distillery from Louisville a smooth, reliable experience rather than an ordeal. The result is a flourishing bourbon tourism economy that draws visitors from around the world and has helped build Kentucky's brand as an aspirational whisky destination.
Scotland has the raw material advantages that no amount of infrastructure investment can replicate — unique geography, centuries of tradition, legal protections that define what Scotch whisky can be. As Gilmour noted, "The Highlands are famous for many things but, economically, few are more important than whisky." What Scotland lacks, and what GMB Scotland is demanding with increasing urgency, is the political will to build the physical infrastructure that would allow that unmatched natural advantage to fully express itself in economic terms. The product in the warehouse is world-class. The road to get it out? That's another story entirely.
The Stakes Have Never Been Higher
The whisky industry is worth £7 billion to the UK economy and supports around 11,000 jobs in the Highlands but, the union warns, is being undermined by delays to transport infrastructure improvements. In a moment when UK export industries are under pressure from multiple directions — global tariffs, shifting trade relationships, inflationary cost pressures — protecting and enhancing the infrastructure that supports one of Britain's most successful global exports should be a political no-brainer. And yet here we are, more than a decade into a road-dualling programme that is still years from completion, with one of the country's most prominent labor unions standing in a convention center in Blackpool making the same arguments that have been made repeatedly, with the same urgency and the same result: more promises.
The approved motion concluded that without urgent action, Scotland risked undermining some of its most successful global industries through what it describes as "avoidable and long-standing political neglect." The word "avoidable" is the most damning part of that sentence. Natural disasters are unavoidable. Economic downturns require complex responses. But a road that needs to be widened, a ferry that needs to be reliable, a rail connection that needs to function — these are solvable problems. They require money, political commitment, and competent delivery management. What they do not require is another decade of promises that the liquid gold aging in Scotland's Highland warehouses, and the communities built around it, cannot afford to wait for.
