Chamber and committees

Thank you. We have run over our time slightly. I suspect that we could go on much longer, minister, but the committee has another evidence session this morning.

I thank all of you—Fiona Hyslop, Colin Cook, Alison Irvine and Chris Wilcock—for your time and input this morning. There might be things that we want to follow up with you in writing, but I thank you for your openness in answering the questions that we have been putting to you.

I suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses.

Welcome back to the second session of this morning’s evidence taking by the Public Audit Committee, which will consider the section 22 report by the Auditor General for Scotland on the audit of Scottish Canals.

I welcome our witnesses, who include representatives from Transport Scotland—that is, the Government—and Scottish Canals. From Scottish Canals, we have John Paterson, chief executive; Maureen Campbell, chair of the board; Sarah Jane Hannah, director of finance and business services; and Richard Millar, chief operating officer. From Transport Scotland, we have Alison Irvine, interim chief executive—good morning, Alison; Kerry Twyman, director of finance and corporate services; and Gary Cox, interim director, aviation, maritime, freight and canals.

We have some questions to put to you about the report but, before we do that, I invite Mr Paterson to make a short opening statement.

You mentioned the former First Minister’s evidence to us. She told us that

“no formal decisions were taken by Cabinet on these matters.”

Was the decision to nationalise the yard, for example, not a Cabinet-level decision?

I will quote back to you what the Auditor General’s report says. Paragraph 15 includes expressions such as

“could not be supported by evidence”,

“lack of data”, “potential errors”, “There were errors”, “a lack of documentation”, “several errors” and so on. The report contains quite a catalogue of criticisms of your methodology, all of which has led to a decision not to issue approval of your accounts. As I mentioned earlier, that was described by the Auditor General as “a serious matter”.

From my point of view, I do not want us to be here again in a year’s time, and I am sure that you do not want that, either, but it feels as though we are hearing the same arguments that we heard a year ago. I think that we need persuading that things are moving forward.

Graham Simpson wants to come in.

Yes—if it is a short one.

These things we shall return to. Graham Simpson has some questions.

That would be helpful, but it sounds a bit like you are saying that you would do the same again.

For the record, there were serious concerns about the performance of the turnaround director, who was a part of the post-nationalisation project.

Again, my understanding of the demarcation here is that Neil Gray is the cabinet secretary who is responsible for the yard.

Let me move on, because time is running away with us already. What is the Scottish Government’s response—because we did not get this from the previous Minister for Transport—to our conclusion that

“There has been a significant lack of transparency and accountability throughout the project”?

We drew attention in particular to the fact that

“FMEL was not open about its inability to provide a full builder’s refund guarantee”.

We also think that, for example, it was “inappropriate”, during the course of a live procurement process, for the then transport minister to respond to a regional list MSP—that is a correction that we need to make to the report—that there had been occasions previously when a full builders refund guarantee had not been necessary. That was then taken as the green light by Jim McColl and the FMEL leadership to continue with their bid in the tendering process.

We have a particular question on that. Before I bring in the deputy convener to go down that line of questioning, I note that you have mentioned the fact that your CV includes deputy convenership of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee and membership of the Economy and Fair Work Committee. However, it also includes Cabinet-level ministerial responsibility between 2009 and 2020, which covers a large part of the time span that we have looked at in our evidence collection. As someone who was a member of the Cabinet during that time, can you tell us which issues around Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow and which issues around Ferguson Marine as it is now constituted came to the Cabinet?