Chamber and committees

You may want to expand on what you mean. All evidence that I give before a committee is as transparent as it can be. I am trying to be very clear with the committee about the decisions that I am speaking about and about those that I had knowledge of at the time versus those that I now have knowledge of but was not part of. I am being as open and transparent as possible with the committee.

After I give evidence, it is for the committee to decide if there are points for clarification that it wants to address. I cannot determine what questions the committee asks; that is for you. I will answer all of them to the best of my ability. I hope that that has been your experience so far in this evidence session.

My differences with Alex Salmond on other matters are well known, but he was the First Minister and Ferguson’s, the last remaining commercial shipbuilder on the upper Clyde, faced the threat of extinction and closure, so he was right to seek to find a way to save the shipyard. Any First Minister would have been right to do that. Although I may now have many differences with Alex Salmond, I would not criticise him for making every effort to find a future for the shipyard.

I was not advised on 20 August. As, I am sure, we will come on to discuss, 20 August was when the decision on FMEL being the preferred bidder was taken. That decision was taken by Keith Brown because Derek Mackay was on holiday at the time. I know that you have gone through all of that with Derek Mackay. I was not party to that decision, but I was, of course, briefed some days later, in the run-up ahead of the announcement of the preferred bidder.

I am being as open as I can be. I deal with several things on a daily basis, and this was some years ago.

I think that it would be fair to say—I do not know whether it would always be expressed as explicitly as this—that, certainly in the months leading up to the decision around public ownership, there would of course have been concern that that was a possibility. Some months previously, FMEL had had a redundancy programme at the yard, and there were clearly very significant financial and cash-flow problems there, so of course that would have been a concern.

Just as FMEL signed up to the terms of the contract for the vessels, so did CMAL, so it was always—understandably—restricted in what it could do by the terms of the contract. CMAL’s view is that simply paying a lot more to FMEL at that time, in line with the claim that FMEL had made, would not have been within the terms of the contract, because there were not unforeseen problems. The contract had terms for modifications within it, but FMEL was not seeking to use those. If CMAL had acceded to those claims, it would have opened itself up to legal challenge from unsuccessful bidders. CMAL was at all times seeking—rightly—to operate within the terms of the contract.

As you know, the Scottish Government asked an independent Queen’s counsel to look at the claim, and that is what led to the conclusion that there was no legal basis for CMAL to make the additional payment that FMEL was requesting. CMAL’s view was that, if FMEL felt that that claim was justified, it should take it through the court process. I say again that FMEL always had that option and it chose not to do that.

The Government was looking at ways in which we could help to get the vessels completed, and to protect the yard and employment there if it was appropriate and possible to do so, over and above the contract terms. That is where the loans came in, and the options that were looked at in project Kildonan: how do we get the vessels completed but also protect the longer-term economic interests? Of course, keeping the yard open was pretty essential to getting the vessels completed. Those were the considerations that led to the decisions that the Government took.

Well, in answer to the last part of your question, I think I have referenced that the latest cost assessment by the current management of Ferguson’s is being scrutinised by the Government. I am not able to give you the outcome of that process, because it is not concluded yet. The current Scottish Government-endorsed estimate from March 2022, in terms of completing the vessels, is known. If there are any increases on that as a result of the latest assessment, that will be properly notified to Parliament in the normal way, but that process is under way and is not complete. I will undertake to go away and come back to you with the costs around things such as Tim Hair’s salary. Obviously, we want not only to complete the vessels—although that is the immediate priority—but the shipyard to have a good, sustainable and successful future. I make no apology for the Government continuing to behave and act in a way that supports that objective.

I think that the political scrutiny of the issue is absolutely 100 per cent justified. It is the understatement of the decade for me to say that the contract has not gone as the Government would have expected or hoped, so I do not complain about the scrutiny and the pressure, or the fact that I am sitting here now having these discussions. That is entirely legitimate and understood.

However, I repeat what I said earlier. Whoever deserves to be under that scrutiny and to take responsibility, or a share of it, for what has happened, that is not the workforce. As Kevin Hobbs told the committee, there is no question about the quality of the work. I have been into Ferguson’s shipyard on many occasions. Obviously, the workforce will change, and people will come and go, but there will be a core workforce that has been there for a long time.

Those workers are skilled shipbuilders and do a fantastic job; they do not deserve and should not get any of the criticism that is, rightly, directed at others—including, on some aspects of this, the Scottish Government. Assuming that they get the right support and the right project management, and that everybody else does their job in the way that we would want and expect, I have every confidence in their ability to build those vessels—and, hopefully, many vessels, long into the future—at that shipyard.

If you read, as I have now done, the submission of 20 August to Keith Brown, seeking approval for the preferred bidder—and if memory serves me correctly—you will see that it was always intended that it would be publicly announced. The suggestion in that submission is that it would be the transport minister who did it. At some point after that, in the course of the process—which goes on literally every day in Government—of looking at the announcements that were coming up, judgments would have been made about whether the profile, subject matter and importance of the announcement meant that it should be a minister making the announcement or that it should be a First Ministerial announcement. That would have emerged as a result of the consideration that is what special advisers and communications officials do. They would have come to me to say, “There is a proposal that you should make this announcement,” and I would have said, “Yes, I will do that.”

I am happy to go and look at what came out of that meeting. From what I remember, I would have then asked officials to do certain things.

The Cabinet takes decisions on policy, budgets and budget cover for certain things. Ministers are tasked to get on with the jobs within their portfolios. They report back to Cabinet and update it, and Cabinet colleagues can ask questions, but that does not always take the form of papers that ask Cabinet to substitute for the minister and to make decisions.