Chamber and committees

Thank you very much indeed. We have run slightly over the time that we had anticipated, but it was important to draw out some of the important pieces of evidence that you have given us this morning.

As always, I thank you very much for your co-operation and frankness, which has been very helpful for us. We will, of course, need to determine what our next steps are but, for the moment, I thank the Auditor General, Mark Taylor and Joanne Brown for your candour this morning, which has been very valuable. I now move the committee into private session.

We might return to some of those questions in the course of the next hour.

Sharon Dowey has a series of questions to put.

Our principal item of business is consideration of the 2021-22 audit of Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow (Holdings) Ltd. I am pleased to welcome our witnesses. The Auditor General, Stephen Boyle, is joined by Mark Taylor, who is an audit director at Audit Scotland, and Joanne Brown, who is a partner at Grant Thornton UK LLP.

We have quite a number of questions to put to our witnesses this morning. Before we get to those, I ask the Auditor General to make a short opening statement.

I invite Bill Kidd to ask a couple of final questions.

For us, as the Public Audit Committee, the question is not just about the fact that those things happened but that they were allowed to happen. Where was the sponsorship team and where was the Government’s oversight? To me, that seems to be a fundamentally important question.

I invite Willie Coffey to put some questions to you.

For the avoidance of doubt, the enterprise must comply with the Scottish public finance manual guidance, so there should be openness and transparency, there should be value for money and there should be an internal audit function, for example. My reading of the external auditor’s report is that FMPG did not have an internal audit function at the time of reporting. Is that still the case?

Again, I note that the reported cost for the FMI report is £200,000, is it not? There is also some concern about that report being covered by a non-disclosure agreement.

My final question goes in a slightly different direction. In the report, you highlighted the question of the demographic of the workforce in the context of the broader point about skills, and whether we are planning sufficiently to invest in the skills that we will need in future. To what extent, in your opinion, is the Scottish Government addressing what you have identified as a skills shortage?

Thank you. I will turn to a couple of areas. In paragraph 11 of your report—which, I think, is an amplification of a letter that the chief executive officer of FMPG that was sent to the convener of the Scottish Parliament’s Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee—you highlight that the estimated costs for the Glen Sannox, or 801, are £101 million and that the estimated costs for 802 are £108.6 million. Why is 802 more expensive than 801?

That is fine. I suppose that the expectation would have been that the second vessel would benefit from lessons learned in the construction of the first vessel, which would lead to a reduction in the cost base.