Chamber and committees

Is that information available?

Sorry to interrupt. At the point of nationalisation, some due diligence and assessment of the vessels must have been done. Did that include looking at what had happened to the huge amount of public money that had been put into the business?

Okay, so—

Did the fact that there was no formal escalation process contribute to the failure? I have said that the programme steering group did not seem to have a clear role, and when issues were raised, Transport Scotland passed them up the line to Scottish ministers on an ad hoc basis.

In the Auditor General’s report, it says that ministers were advised on an “ad hoc” basis.

Did they work?

It seems that there was some conflict in the information that CMAL and FMEL were producing—one was rather more optimistic than the other. How were the issues dealt with when they were escalated up the line to the PSG, Transport Scotland and so on? What interventions were made to try to resolve what had become a contract dispute?

Given the different claims that were being made, it is clear that dispute management or resolution—whatever we want to call it—should have been used. I think that there was an option for that in the contract, but it was never exercised. Why?

That sounds a bit odd to me, but let us move to the interesting stuff: the money. The Scottish Government gave loan support to FMEL outside of the payments under the contract. What was the rationale for and purpose of those loans? Were any conditions of note attached to the loans? If so, were they adhered to? How was the success or otherwise of the loans assessed?

Yet, at the point of nationalisation, there was no sign of any results from that money—not just the loans, but the staged payments. The Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee’s report “Construction and procurement of ferry vessels in Scotland” makes it clear that those staged payments seemed odd, because some were done out of sequence just in order to hit a target, but bore no relation to the progression that should have been in place for constructing those vessels. That is more than evident from their state when nationalisation took place. Given the concerns that were raised by that committee, what happened at nationalisation? You took over hugely incomplete vessels—a few million pounds of steel here and there—but £128.25 million in total has been poured into the yard, and there is nothing to show for it.