Chamber and committees

Thank you very much. I point out to members that, if they want to put a question directly to an individual, it is absolutely appropriate for them to do so. If one of the witnesses wants to come in, they should indicate so with their hand and I will bring them in as best I can. I want the evidence session to be as free flowing as possible, and I want to allow members to ask questions of the people who they think are most appropriate to answer them. I am not overriding Morag McNeill; I am just giving committee members some guidance.

If I start wagging my pen at you—which is a Christine Grahame trick—it means that I want you to try to keep your answers a little shorter, on the basis that we have quite a lot of questions to ask. My pen has never flown out of my fingers when I have been wagging it before, but that will be my indication rather than telling people to stop talking, which I do not think is helpful.

The first questions come from the deputy convener, Fiona Hyslop.

Thank you for your submission of 21 February on decarbonising Scotland’s ferries on the route to net zero, which was useful. Do you believe that the Scottish Government’s ferry services can be carbon neutral by 2045, particularly in light of the fact that CMAL is purchasing four marine-oil-powered vessels, with an expected lifespan of 30 years, and on the basis that we heard from Norway that you cannot change fuels midway through a vessel’s life? Norway’s opinion is that if a vessel is built for a particular fuel, that is what you are left with.

So will you be commissioning more LNG ships?

That is probably a good place to leave it.

We thank you and your officials very much for giving evidence, minister. I will briefly suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses.

Just to remind you, under “Decision-making structure”, about which the report makes recommendations, it talks about

“a cluttered decision-making landscape that lacks transparency ... varying degrees of failure”

and

“CMAL ... and Transport Scotland”

failing

“to discharge their respective responsibilities competently and effectively.”

That is fairly damning.

I want to find out whether you are comfortable with the process. Let me see whether I can do this by interpreting the jargon. The end user—the passenger—feeds into the service provider, which is the ferry operator, which feeds into the asset provider, which is CMAL, which feeds into the Government through Transport Scotland: you have told us that the two are the same. Transport Scotland feeds back to CMAL, which then stipulates what the ferry contract is going to be, as far as building the ship is concerned.

That is hardly working together. Are you comfortable with that process?

We will go back to Monica Lennon for another question.

For clarity—I think that Liam Kerr has asked about this before—the issue is that national insurance does not have to be paid, which means that the Government employs people without paying national insurance. I think that that is the issue that you are being asked to justify, minister.

Chris Wilcock is trying to catch your eye—you might not want him to.

The committee will therefore report the outcome of the instrument in due course. I invite members to delegate the authority to me as convener to finalise the report for publication. Are members happy to do that?

Members indicated agreement.

Welcome back. Our next agenda item is an evidence session as part of our inquiry into a modern and sustainable ferry service for Scotland. I refer members to the papers for this item, which is the 11th evidence session in our inquiry into Scotland’s ferry services.

Our first panel today is made up of representatives from Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd, which is a company owned by the Scottish Government and is the asset owner of some of Scotland’s ports and vessels. On behalf of the committee, I am pleased to welcome from CMAL: Morag McNeill, chair; Kevin Hobbs, the chief executive officer; Jim Anderson, director of vessels; and Ramsay Muirhead, director of port infrastructure and planning. I thank them for accepting our invitation. We are very pleased to have them here.

I believe Kevin Hobbs would like to make a brief opening statement.

Kevin, I want to go back to the answer that you gave, in which you said that you basically feel that the system works fairly well. You will have read the “Construction and procurement of ferry vessels in Scotland” report. Did you agree with that, in principle?