Meeting of the Parliament 08 June 2023
I said, “in the history of the Scottish Parliament.” The member might not have realised that, in the case that he has raised, the blank cheque was written before the building of this Parliament. On that basis, there is no point there.
The Government wrote the biggest blank cheque in the history of the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament, and the people are now paying the price.
This is a story of an SNP Government failing to respond time and time again openly and transparently to legitimate questions. Regrettably, this is also a story of SNP members of the Public Audit Committee blatantly seeking to undermine the report in a cynical bid to get their ministers off the hook. All the while, it is Scotland’s island communities who are paying the price.
I turn to Audit Scotland’s original report of March 2022, which made it clear that Scottish ministers approved the contract award to Ferguson Marine Engineering Limited in October 2015. They did so despite knowing the significant risks caused by FMEL’s inability to provide mandatory refund guarantees and despite the severe misgivings of CMAL.
The impartial Auditor General for Scotland said that
“There is insufficient ... evidence to explain why Scottish ministers”
made that decision. The worst part of all of that is that no minister has come to Parliament to take responsibility for the tragic comedy of errors that has unfolded.
Let us look at some of the evidence that we took and some of the key conclusions of the report: Jim McColl told us that the ferries being built at Ferguson’s are “obsolete” and will spew out “poisonous gases”; Morag McNeill, who is the interim chair of CMAL, told us that the preferred bidder announcement risked the entire procurement process. She said:
“Our preference was for that to be done on a confidential basis and for there not to be a public announcement.”—[Official Report, Public Audit Committee, 30 June 2022; c 12.]
Derek Mackay, who is the former transport minister, admitted that there had been a “catastrophic failure” at the shipyard.
Colleagues will know that the report was not agreed with the unanimous support of the committee. That is regrettable. Perpetually and in public—and sometimes petulantly in private—SNP committee members chose to dismiss the evidence, which was clear and overwhelming. A close examination of the report reveals some of the core conclusions that Mr Beattie and Mr Coffey sought to delete or dilute. For example, Richard Leonard proposed that additional wording be added to refer to the
“poor judgement”
that had been shown by Derek Mackay and
“to reflect that the integrity of the procurement process had been compromised.”