Hansard

First, I apologise to the chamber—I have had laryngitis this week, but I thought that it was important to come here today to make the case that the Simclar workers have been making to me as a local constituency MSP.

Since I first raised the matter two weeks ago at First Minister's question time, a sorry and disgraceful tale of injustice has emerged. I put a point to the First Minister about asset stripping, and that very afternoon Sam Russell put out a press release calling the First Minister, me and other politicians who had responded "ill-informed". Having listened to what the workforce has had to say—some of which I want to put in the public domain today—I think that members can draw their own conclusions about that.

This is a tale of a company that has demonstrated no regard for its workforce, employment obligations or the communities affected by the closure. It is a company that, as far as I can see, is motivated by profit. It is not working in partnership with the workforce, but operating and closing at the expense of the workforce and the local community.

I want to take a moment to say that I am very proud of how the workers and their families have behaved even though they have been struggling with no income in the past few weeks. They have behaved with dignity and in an orderly manner at public meetings and within the local community, despite much provocation. I know that members who have attended some of those meetings will acknowledge and agree with that.

No matter which part of the political spectrum members come from, they all see that an injustice has been done. Questions have to be asked about how the closure has taken place and about the ethics of a company that is transferring or selling—we are not sure which yet—capital assets within weeks of closure. For those who know the local situation, I speak of the B building in Kilwinning. Not only was that asset transferred to the parent company, Simclar International, but for the past few weeks the parent company has been charging Simclar Ayrshire rent. While the plant sits empty with no workers and no work, Simclar International continues to take rent. That is an outrageous situation. With no commercial activity taking place, the company is taking money out of the workers' pockets and what should have been their redundancy payments.

Questions have to be asked about how the company could simply close the doors and call in the administrators when it had orders on the books. I am told that there was work for at least six months, and in the communities that I represent such a timescale is not to be sneezed at. Six months of work in Irvine and Kilwinning is important. However, the company simply transferred the contracts to the parent company while telling us that it had no assets.

That brings me to the question of the millions of pounds of stock and assets that are held outwith Simclar Ayrshire, in the United States and elsewhere. They belong to Simclar Ayrshire, but the company appeared to forget about them until a redundant manager brought them to my attention and I passed the information on to the administrators.

Furthermore, pension contributions were deducted every week from employees' salaries until 29 January, but they were not paid to the pension company. One employee confirmed that the last payment to his pension company was on 14 December while the last deduction from his salary was 29 January. I say to Mr Russell that six weeks of pension payments is a lot of money to the families, because they have survived on nothing in the past two weeks. I call on Mr Russell, even now, to do the right thing and pay the money back.

At a recent meeting, the administrators said that there were buyers for much of the plant and machinery—Mr Gallie mentioned the movement of goods in and out. Who were the buyers? Simclar International, the parent company. We have to ask ourselves why it needs that additional equipment if there has been such a downturn in the market. The reason is that the contracts have been transferred. The highly skilled workers in my constituency who are turning up at the job centre desperate for work are being told that there is a company looking for their skills. It is called Flexible Recruitment Services, and the workers would have to be willing to travel to Dunfermline. Guess who the principal owner of the contract agency FRS is—Simclar International.

Questions have to be asked and answered. I am grateful to the minister, who responded quickly and came to the constituency on the Monday following the closure and called for a DTI investigation, which was the right thing to do. I have not had the opportunity to speak about the upskilling, retraining and regeneration of the area, which are important to me as the local MSP, but I hope that there will be opportunities to do that in future.

I support the amendment in the name of the minister.