Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The SNP’s ferry mess

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Eight years ago, and with the independence referendum one month away, the Clyde’s last commercial shipyard went into administration. The collapse of Ferguson’s not only threatened the jobs of 70 shipbuilders: it was an inconvenient symbol of industrial decline right as the SNP was trying to parlay rhetoric about an independent Scotland being ‘one of the world’s wealthiest nations’ into a Yes vote on polling day. The Scottish government intervened and quickly arranged for a billionaire adviser to then First Minister Alex Salmond to buy Ferguson’s.

One year later, the Scottish government awarded Ferguson Marine, as it now was, a £97m fixed price contract to build two ferries but the following month the yard told the government it couldn’t meet its contractual obligation to provide a full-refund guarantee. Despite this, the agreement remained in place and Ferguson Marine began preparations to build the ferries, both scheduled for delivery in 2018.

There will be no meaningful accountability for this scandal

The years that followed saw a succession of delays and disputes between Ferguson Marine and the Scottish government until the yard entered administration again in 2019, by which point it had received more than £100m in taxpayers’ money between contract payments and loans. It was then nationalised by SNP ministers but three years on the ferries remain unfinished, with Scottish government finance minister Kate Forbes confirming another delay on Wednesday. The total cost of the ferry project now stands at least at £240m, two-and-a-half times the original estimate.

Forbes was not the only person talking about ferries on Wednesday. Audit Scotland, the watchdog that oversees how the Scottish government spends money, published its report into the contract. It concludes there is ‘insufficient documentary evidence to explain why Scottish ministers accepted the risks and were content to approve the contract’. It says the agreement was ‘not effective when problems emerged’ and ‘some of the milestones in the contract were not clearly defined and had no link to quality standards’, yet the Scottish government was ‘legally obliged to make those milestone payments’.

The report finds ‘weaknesses in project governance’ and ‘no formal escalation processes in place’ despite planning and design issues arising four months into the contract.

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