Lord Fraser plans to begin by questioning civil servants

The man appointed to look into the rising price of the Holyrood project said there would be a preliminary session next week.

Lord Fraser of Carmyllie told BBC Scotland that he will report his findings as soon as the new parliament building is complete.

And he said an appeal for e-mails from whistleblowers had received an "extraordinary" response.

Lord Fraser has spent the summer collecting documentary evidence dating back six years.

Full hearings

He plans to announce the names of some of the witnesses he intends to call at the preliminary hearing.

He told the Politics Tonight programme that senior civil servants would be the first to give evidence when the full hearings begin in October.

"I intend to start with calling those civil servants who advised (then Scottish Secretary) Donald Dewar and other ministers about the prospective opportunities for the location of the parliament in Edinburgh and analyse the way that they first suggested what might be the likely costs," he said.

We have had an extraordinary number of hits on the website Lord Fraser

Lord Fraser has no powers to compel people to appear before the inquiry.

However, he repeated his threat to name and shame those who refused.

He also told how he had spent time observing the Hutton inquiry into the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly.

He said he also wanted to be open to public scrutiny.

Lord Fraser hopes to make the papers needed to understand the situation available to the media and the public in an electronic format at the hearings.

He said he was not against the idea of television cameras being present, so long as they were not obtrusive.

Widest publicity

And he said he had wanted the venue for the inquiry to be somewhere accessible for the media and the public.

"One of the things I am determined to do is that it allows for the widest possible publicity and reporting across Scotland," he said.

He identified the difficulties in securing a venue as one of the reasons why the inquiry has not yet got under way.

The final cost of the parliament could rise further

He also had to gain access to a "considerable volume of paper" covering the last six years.

The website set up for the inquiry has a secure area for whistleblowers.

Lord Fraser's team said it was continuing to provide "quality information".

The Tory peer acknowledged that the facility may attract some people who wanted to put their own "spiteful" interpretation on events.

But he said: "We have had an extraordinary number of hits on the website.

Pub talk

"We have had a number of very interesting observations from people who worked on the site or from their spouses."

He said the information offered through the website gave him something to examine rather than having to rely on "pub talk".