Meeting of the Parliament 09 December 2025
Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. I will try to stick to my time, as the other speakers have.
I congratulate the Public Audit Committee on its detailed report. I do not recognise all the things that the convener said in his speech from the report, but the majority of them are there. I am delighted to see the forensic approach that has been taken by the committee, including my ex-colleague Jamie Greene, who was with me on the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee and has spent as much time as I have looking at the ferries. He and I, as well as this Parliament, have survived four chief executive officers, four chairs, seven cabinet secretaries and 10 ministers—quite a number, in other words.
Where are we now? As the Public Audit Committee has reported, we are with a yard with no orders; a yard that, going by the evidence that we have been given on the way that it is structured, is going to need 25 to 30 per cent more money to produce a ferry than any other yard in the world; and a yard that needs about £14.2 million invested—I will come back to that last point, because at one stage we heard that it would be £25 million, so there seems to have been a bit of a reduction.
How have we got here? It is quite clear that there has been Government incompetence and management incompetence, and there is now no confidence from people who want to order ferries.
The Government incompetence goes back many years. First, who would award a contract to a company with no proven management experience in shipbuilding? I acknowledge that there might have been great experience among the workers, but the management of the yard would never have built a ship in their lives. Secondly, the Government allowed two ferries to be built at a yard that could not house two ferries, despite the fact that, as part of the contract, they had to be built at the same time. If that is not incompetence, I do not know what it is.
Then we got the arrangement of 15 staged payments for each of the ferries. What a great idea. Most yards across the world ask for five, but because the Government was keen to ensure that the person running the yard got as much support as possible, it agreed to 15 staged payments, and then managed to pay £82.5 million of the £97 million contract value when less than one ferry was built. That is incompetence.
What did we do then? When we got the yard into private ownership, we appointed Tim Hare to be the turnaround director. I know for a fact that, if you are a good turnaround director, you are never out of work. Well, Tim was the only one who was available. I also know that, if you are the turnaround director and you are six months into your job, you are no longer the solution to the problem—you are the problem. That was proved by the fact that, when he left, he had taken a huge amount of money from the Government and had not done much to turn the yard around.
We then got to the situation with the chair—I was amused by the convener’s comments about this. The Government appointed a chair to run Ferguson Marine who had never built a boat in his life. He had pretty incompetently run Prestwick airport, and he gave speeches to the committee, which I heard a number of times and which I did not understand. They seemed to be a series of jargon-speak joined together into paragraphs that did not make any sense. Perhaps it was a code that the Government understood, but, as a human being, I could not understand it, so I am with the convener on that.
Where are we now? We have a yard with no orders. Western Ferries has taken its order and given it to Cammell Laird, and even the Government has turned the yard down, taking its orders to Turkey and Poland.
What we do not know at this stage, and what the Government has never come clean about, which I find quite bizarre, is what the unrecoverable costs of running the yard are. How much does it cost to keep the lights on, to pay the rates and to run the electricity in the yard? We do not know, but no more money is going to be paid for the ferries. We have been told that the yard has had all the money that it is going to get, apart from some contingency funds. So, apparently, the money that the yard has—although I do not see it in any bank account—is mythically going to multiply to cover its running costs until it gets a new order. I hope that the Government will tell us about that.
The Labour Party is calling for another £14.2 million to be invested in the yard.