Hansard

The ferries fiasco is a national embarrassment of the SNP’s making. The ferries are four years late and after today will be five years late, at two and a half times the original budget. Windows were painted on just for the First Minister, cables were too short and a bulbous bow was too small. There has been endless squabbling, and now there is a damning Audit Scotland report.

The embarrassment is never ending, but it is not just an embarrassment. The situation has a real-world effect on islanders, taxpayers and the workers at the shipyard. The effect on islanders is significant; breakdowns and cancellations are commonplace. That is not a surprise, though, given the ageing ferry fleet, much of which was built on the lower Clyde in the days of Margaret Thatcher. Who would have thought that Margaret Thatcher would have a better shipbuilding record than the SNP? Yet she did.

The delays today could have been avoided if the SNP had had a proper ferry-building plan to replace the ageing fleet, but it did not. The delays almost every day could have been avoided if the SNP had built the ferries when it promised to—five years ago—but it did not. The repeated delays could have been avoided if the SNP had managed to get the ferries built in 2018, 2019, 2020 or even 2021. All of those were dates for completion promised by the SNP, but it failed over and over again.

Even now, the date has been delayed until next year. “Not more delays, cancellations and breakdowns through another cold Scottish winter,” I hear the islanders cry. One said:

“The fiasco with procurement and the ageing fleet is going to get worse rather than better in the next number of years. It’s horrendous.”

The people who are waiting for the new ferry for Arran will just need to wait longer. Those who are waiting for the new ferry to Skye will need to wait even longer. “The Skye Boat Song” would never have been quite the same without the boat.

The delays are long and tortuous, and the costs have shot through the roof. Patients, children and the homeless will just have to watch as the Scottish Government spends ever greater sums of money on two ferries that are still not complete. The costs have rocketed from £97 million to £240 million, and possibly to an estimated £400 million—four times the original price.

Let us put that in context. It would pay for seven high schools for children who are desperately waiting to move from their damp-ridden buildings. It would buy 2,000 council houses for those who are desperate for a home. It buys just one new children’s hospital in Edinburgh—but that is another story. The SNP seems to think that it is okay for all those people to wait and watch it bungle contracts for building ships on the Clyde. The issue has got so embarrassing for the SNP that it even refused to be interviewed by the BBC about the matter.

However, that is nothing compared with the embarrassment that it feels now that the SNP-owned ferry company is not even bidding to build its own ferries. Those ferries will be built by Turkish yards and benefiting Turkish workers, Turkish taxpayers and Turkish communities. I have heard some say that the new slogan should be “SNP: Stronger for Turkey”.

Because the situation has got so desperate and embarrassing, the SNP is reaching for Boris Johnson’s playbook on building bridges: it now wants to build one to Mull. If the minister is listening, I say to her that she should get on with building the fixed links in Shetland, which wants them, instead of Mull, which does not.

All of this is a prime example of a failed SNP industrial intervention strategy. It intervened with Burntisland Fabrications before the company collapsed. It is exposed to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds at the Lochaber smelter and the 2,000 jobs are nowhere to be seen. It has spent millions on Prestwick airport, but still cannot sell it. It is potentially exposed to millions of pounds for the environmental clean-up at the Lanarkshire steel mills. It also seems incapable of handling relationships with business. It was duped by the £10 billion Chinese deal that never was. It tried to renege on a deal with Tata Steel over clean-up costs. Now it is not even able to train enough workers to build just eight wind turbine jackets in Fife.

The SNP’s record on ferry building is just one example of a series of industrial-sized failures. It is the workers, the taxpayers and the islanders who will lose out. We need a new plan for ferry construction, new investment to replace the ageing fleet, a turnaround plan that works for Ferguson’s, a Government that delivers on its promises and a public inquiry into this utter shambles, but I suspect that, like everybody else, we will be kept waiting ever longer before we get any of those things.