Chamber and committees

We are limited for time, so I have just one other question before I bring in Willie Coffey. You alluded to the permanent secretary, who, in correspondence with the Finance and Public Administration Committee, recently said:

“there is no overarching statutory duty to record all decisions in a particular way”.

Do you consider that the lack of such a statutory duty contributed to the failure to record the important decision by the Scottish ministers on 9 October 2015 to award the contract?

I am not sure that I got an answer to my question about the challenge function and the role of the director general of finance. “Transport Scotland Framework Document”, which was published in 2012—it was applicable at the time of awarding the contract—says clearly that one of the roles of the portfolio accountable officer within the directorate general is to challenge.

Roy, you are now the DG in the relevant department—albeit that it has changed its name—and, formerly, you were the chief executive of Transport Scotland. Do you not see that there should have been a role for the DG accountable officer to challenge? Was there such a role?

However, from what we have heard this morning, the lines of challenge that we would expect to be in place for a contract of that size appear not to have been in place or to have operated or worked, and the framework document appears to be a piece of paper rather than a living document. It was a framework document that gathered dust, rather than leading to the correct challenges being made to those decisions.

Our view is that the concerns that were raised by CMAL extend beyond the description “a particular issue”. There were pretty comprehensive concerns about the risks involved in placing the orders.

For the third and final time, was there a role in that process for the director general of finance?

Okay. We do not know whether they were satisfied or not and, with hindsight of what happened to the project, we can speculate about whether “satisfied” comes anywhere close to it.

I invite Colin Beattie to come in with questions on his area of inquiry.

Just for the record, we have not written to them yet. We have indicated that we are going to write to them, but the letters have not dropped through their letter boxes yet.

As part of that new arrangement, was a commitment given to CMAL that it would be compensated and that its budget would be increased to accommodate the change in the profiling of payments?

On that note—which is where we might pick things up again in the future—I thank Mr Brannen for his time and the evidence that he has given. I also thank all the members of the team who joined him, including Mo Rooney, who contributed towards the end of the session. As I said, there are whole areas of the report that we think it is important to interrogate. That is one of the reasons why Mr Cook was not called this morning. I am sure that we will get back in touch, Mr Brannen, to see whether we can arrange a follow-up session, because lots of important issues have been raised this morning but we did not quite get to some of the ground that we need to cover. Once again, I thank the witnesses for their time.

I close the public part of this morning’s meeting.

Who would ministerial approval be sought from?

For the avoidance of doubt, Fran Pacitti said that that did not happen in the case of vessels 801 and 802.