Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 20 April 2022
The situation at Ferguson Marine has been called many things: a fiasco, a scandal, a farce. It has been described as the height of incompetence and as a complete mess. Although those descriptions are no doubt accurate, it is important that Parliament does not become obsessed with the process and pantomime and lose sight of the real-life impact of the situation.
The reality is that the situation is harming communities every day. This is not a parliamentary soap opera; there are communities to whom promises were made. Those promises were not kept. That is what our debate is about. We should be open about how those communities came to experience years of disruption, with years more still to come.
The stories that they tell illustrate the impact of years of shocking Government mismanagement. Last week, the BBC reported the plight of an 81-year-old couple from Arran and the lengths that the two had to go to in order to attend a hospital appointment in Kilmarnock. What should have been a simple return journey turned into an exhausting 94-mile detour involving three ferry crossings. Those elderly people were forced to choose between making that gruelling journey or paying for a three-day hotel stay to attend a 30-minute appointment
There is also the story of a young couple with a newborn baby. They were forced to abandon their car on the mainland when their ferry home was cancelled. That story becomes more harrowing when we consider that they had just been discharged from hospital, that the baby had been born prematurely and that the mother was recovering from a caesarean section.
Just yesterday, residents on Arran learned that the ferry serving the main route between their island and the mainland will be out of action until at least Friday, following an engine failure.
We must also remember the damage being done to local economies and to the tourism that those islands rely on. Caledonian MacBrayne’s managing director has accepted that services are, in his words, “at a really difficult point”. The average age of a CalMac ferry is fast approaching 23 years, while more than a quarter of the company’s major vessels have passed their 30-year design life. When sailings are cancelled, there are no spare vessels to cover those journeys and to serve customers.
That is why it was music to people’s ears when the announcement came that two new vessels to serve our island communities, including Arran, would be built at Ferguson Marine on the Clyde. The work was originally supposed to be completed in 2018. We are now told that the ferries will be ready in 2023. Our island communities will believe that when they see it.
Even if, this time, the ferries have real windows that are made of glass and funnels that do something other than providing accommodation for seagulls, islanders will still be forced to wait and will still be subject to horrendous delays and cancellations and the uncertainty that comes from those. That story is all too familiar to our island communities. They have been dealing with it for years, since long before the scandal was splashed across our national newspapers.
In truth, this latest debacle is only adding insult to an injury that was sustained a long time ago. Those who dared to believe the Government’s promise to fix the situation have now been left doubly disappointed and angry. To make things worse, it seems that absolutely nobody is being held to account for this failure.
The Scottish Government’s website states that an open Government
“gives the public information about the decisions it makes ... supports people to understand and influence those decisions ... and values and encourages accountability (responsibility for those decisions).”
Scottish Liberal Democrats thought that today was a good opportunity to review the Scottish Government’s progress in those areas and on those aims.
When it comes to sharing information about decisions, nobody can say how the Government came to decide to give the contract to Ferguson Marine in the first place. In fact, Audit Scotland could not get to the bottom of it because there was no paper trail. We are talking about the decision to award a then £100 million contract in the face of warnings from Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd.
An open Government aims to support people to influence decisions, but no one can claim that islanders have been at the heart of this process. In fact, decisions were reportedly taken because they fitted in with the Scottish National Party’s conference timetable and not because they were necessarily the right decisions for islanders.
What about the lofty aim of encouraging accountability and responsibility? We have had the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy telling us that she could not say who made the decision. The First Minister then danced around the question of who gave the sign-off before conveniently attaching it to Derek Mackay. It is awfully convenient for Nicola Sturgeon that the latest scandal that is threatening her Government and, indeed, her premiership can be neatly blamed on someone who has since departed politics. However, if we are to take the First Minister at her word, Derek Mackay should appear before Parliament to give his side of the story and confirm that the First Minister and the rest of her Cabinet had no input into the deal that is set to cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds more than was originally scheduled.
The public and our island communities deserve answers and accountability. This open Government is asking us to believe that a £100 million contract was awarded on the eve of the SNP’s conference without the direct involvement of a famously precise First Minister—a First Minister who famously remarked that she
“didn’t say don’t go ahead”,
whatever that means; a First Minister who ranked the Government’s acquisition of the Ferguson shipyard among her proudest achievements; and a First Minister who has refused to apologise to the island communities that have been affected by this calamity. They deserve better. In 2014, Nicola Sturgeon became First Minister. In 2016, she described the Ferguson shipyard as
“going from strength to strength.”
It is now 2022 and there is not a ship in sight.
Scotland used to be the proudest shipbuilding nation on this planet. In the 20th century, more than 30,000 vessels were built in shipyards on the Clyde, whereas, in the 21st century, the Government can barely manage to build two. Oh, how lamentably far we have fallen under SNP leadership.
I move,
That the Parliament condemns the severe delays to the production of vessels 801 and 802 contracted by Scottish Government-owned Caledonian Maritime Assets Limited (CMAL), paid for by the Scottish Government, built originally by a company celebrated by the Scottish Government and, since 2019, by the nationalised Scottish Government-owned company; believes that these delays have left islanders and communities without reliable services that are critical to island life; notes that the Scottish Government’s Open Government Action Plan 2021-25 states that “an open government gives the public information about the decisions it makes, supports people to understand and influence those decisions, and values and encourages accountability (responsibility for those decisions)”; considers that the Scottish Government has breached each of its own tests of open government, to the cost of taxpayers and the islanders waiting year after year for the ferries that they need; notes the impact on their local economies and the impact of the cost overrun on the spending available for other public service priorities; expresses regret that no Scottish minister has either resigned nor considered resigning despite all of these events, and believes that if vessels 801 and 802 are not completed within the revised timescale and cost, as provided to Parliament on 23 March 2022, the latest in a string of revisions, then the ministers responsible deserve to finally be held to account in the form of resignations, and calls on the Scottish Government to give this assurance.
16:43