Official Report 646KB pdf
CalMac Ferries Chief Executive (Severance Package)
To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to reports that the former chief executive of CalMac received a severance package exceeding £170,000, including whether this complied with the severance provisions set out in the Scottish public finance manual. (S6T-02834)
CalMac Ferries has confirmed in response to those press reports that its former chief executive officer did not receive a severance package of £170,000; it confirmed that payments consisted of salary and pension payments to which the CEO was entitled, in addition to compensation payments for loss of office.
When the settlement agreement was proposed, CalMac initially indicated that the settlement would be £95,000, in line with the requirements of the Scottish public finance manual. We have recently been advised by CalMac that that figure did not include accrued holiday pay, as it should have done. Payment for that was subsequently added and, in including that, the final payment that reflected the compensation settlement was £107,635, which is above the threshold at which ministerial approval should have been sought.
Given the level of the settlement, the decision should have come to ministers, and I therefore find the position to be entirely unsatisfactory. The permanent secretary has undertaken to look further into the circumstances around the settlement, and officials have now written to the CalMac CEO and the chair to remind them of the need to comply with the Scottish public finance manual and to seek a full and detailed explanation as to why due process was not followed in that case.
I am glad that I asked, because it is difficult to see whether any of that would ever have come to light for the public.
The Scottish public finance manual is abundantly clear on the process for severance packages. Ministerial views must be sought on any payments of more than £95,000. Paragraph 7.5 of the section on settlement agreements is clear that
“views must be obtained”
in any particularly
“high profile cases”.
I have to say that the CEO’s exit from CalMac is a particularly high-profile case.
In light of what the cabinet secretary just said, at what point did she know that the payment had been made? Was that after the payment had been made? One presumes so. At any point up until then, did anyone in the Government or the civil service receive a business case for the severance package? If so, who signed it off?
There were a number of points in there. On notice, ministers were given information that there would be a settlement. Obviously, it is up to CalMac to make decisions about employment positions. Officials signed off the business case; there was indeed a business case. Jamie Greene set out well what is in the finance manual, and that is exactly the process. I add that the then head of the ferries division at Transport Scotland wrote to CalMac to say that, if the settlement was in excess of £95,000, it would require a new business case, so CalMac was alerted to that. What happened is that the accrued holiday pay of just over £12,000 should have triggered the different process that has been set out.
As I indicated, we take the matter seriously. The permanent secretary has undertaken to look further into the circumstances as to why the additional £12,000 of accrued holiday pay was not added to the original amount, which would have triggered the requirement for ministerial approval.
I am still none the wiser as to whether the cabinet secretary knew about the scale of the payment that would be made and when that information was made available to Government. The cabinet secretary just stated that the Government was told that there would be a payment, which I presume means that it was told in advance of the payment being made. However, it sounds as though it was given the wrong information about the value of the payment that would be made; the total value then went over the limit at which ministers would have had to intervene to authorise the payment.
The whole thing is entirely unacceptable. Chucking CalMac under the bus is not the answer, because this is symptomatic of the Government failing to follow due process in signing off such payments, and it follows a series of repeated events in which high-profile heads of public agencies have departed with substantial golden goodbyes—this is yet another example. Will the Government immediately open an internal inquiry to get to the bottom of how these endlessly repeated breakdowns in the process are happening? Will the Government get a grip of such severance payments once and for all?
I make it clear that what is identified as making up a settlement agreement includes payment in lieu of notice, compensation for loss of office, legal fees and, as I said, accrued holiday pay. I do not think that it is satisfactory if procedures are not followed, and I am sure that the permanent secretary, in looking further into the circumstances, will want to indicate how public corporations such as CalMac should deal with the process.
My member’s bill—the Freedom of Information Reform (Scotland) Bill—includes a provision that public bodies must proactively publish information. The Scottish Information Commissioner has ruled that CalMac breached freedom of information rules by withholding information relating to severance payments and that there is a legitimate public interest in knowing how much senior executives are paid on exit from public bodies. Does the cabinet secretary agree with the aims of my bill, which would require bodies such as CalMac to proactively publish information such as the detail of severance payments for senior executives?
As Ms Clark knows from her professional background, any situation in which employment legislation is applied to an individual case must be treated carefully. However, I point out that the information has possibly come to light because CalMac’s annual report and accounts identify the compensation for loss of office, along with the salary and the employer’s pension contribution. In other words, the information that she is seeking is actually publicly available.
I thank the cabinet secretary for her earlier answers, but I am slightly confused. Robbie Drummond worked for three days of that year and seems to have been paid £35,000 for each day that he worked, which is high by anyone’s standards.
Can we have a definitive answer, cabinet secretary? Did you agree to that or not? Do you think that £35,000 a day is appropriate? Those are simple questions.
Please always speak through the chair.
Sorry.
To answer simply, it is for the CalMac board to make those decisions, as it did. Regarding employment contracts, Mr Mountain will know that different people in different employment will have different arrangements in any situation where there would be a severance payment. The payment did not come to ministers for approval; that was not required at the time because the payment was, at that point, below £95,000. It was the accrual of another £12,000 in holiday pay that took the payment over that amount, and that is the information that should have come to me. I am not satisfied about that, which is why it is quite appropriate for the permanent secretary to examine the issue.
This is not the first time that a CalMac chief executive has been given a severance package, and that is all due to the Scottish National Party Government’s mismanagement of our ferries. Meanwhile, the only people who are not being compensated for the ferry fiasco are the islanders who are suffering as a consequence. When will they be paid compensation and when will a permanent compensation package be put in place?
That is somewhat wide of the substantive question.
It is, but I will try to address it if I can. We are not paying compensation for disruption across any of the transport modes, such as that recently seen on the trunk roads. However, the member will know that the Government is cognisant of business resilience issues in our islands, which is why Mairi Gougeon, the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands, has provided £4.4 million for business resilience to islands that have been affected and impacted. That support was recently expanded to include Islay, Jura, Mull and other islands.
Classroom Supplies
To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to reports of a postcode lottery for classroom supplies and that some schools have only 93p per child per week for basic classroom supplies. (S6T-02831)
This Government has increased funding for education. In 2025-26, the education and skills resource budget rose by £165 million to more than £3.2 billion, and local government received a record £15 billion, with an increase of more than £1 billion to support education and other local services.
Scotland has the highest spend per pupil in the United Kingdom, at £10,100 per pupil, which is approximately 20 per cent higher than spending per pupil in other parts of the United Kingdom.
It is essential that the funding that is protected by this Government centrally gets to the chalk face in our classrooms, where it will make the biggest difference. That is why I recently appointed John Wilson, a respected former headteacher, to lead work nationally that will interrogate issues pertaining to governance and school funding.
The analysis of freedom of information data from local authorities that was reported at the weekend shows that six of the eight lowest-spending councils rank among the areas with the most deprived neighbourhoods, with some schools spending less than £1 per child per week on classroom supplies. In response to those findings, a Scottish Government spokesperson—we heard the cabinet secretary echo a lot of this in her answer—pointed in particular to funding that is provided through the Scottish attainment challenge, including pupil equity funding, which is supposed to go directly to schools in the most deprived communities to support children who are affected by poverty.
Is it not clear that year upon year of reductions and cuts to council budgets have led councils to have to make such decisions and that the money, which is meant to be additional—it is meant to add to our anti-poverty strategies and work to close the attainment gap—is not getting to where it needs to go? I note that the cabinet secretary mentioned John Wilson, but does she recognise her own responsibility in this area? What confidence does she have that the funds that are given by her Government to tackle inequality are being used effectively? What analysis has she done of that?
There were a number of different points in Mr O’Kane’s question. I am mindful of time, but I will try to respond to them all.
He is absolutely correct to say that pupil equity funding should be additional in relation to school budgets, and that is the way that it has been protected by this Government through budgetary processes. I observe that the Scottish Labour Party was unable to support the previous budget.
On the FOI data, as I understand it, we do not have such data on the issue from all local authorities. It is also important to say that the article that Mr O’Kane cited notes that the data can be recorded differently from council to council, and that most of the figures, as we understand it, relate to the financial year 2024-25. Of course, those figures were obtained by a tabloid newspaper.
On the substantive point that Mr O’Kane makes, it is important that we have an understanding at central Government level of how the additionality is being used in relation to school supplies. That is why I have asked officials and education analysts to give me a fuller update in that regard, because those measurements differ by local authority.
However, it is the case that there has been an increase to the education budget, which Mr O’Kane and his colleagues were unable to support in last year’s budget.
I find it extraordinary that, in the final months of the current session of Parliament, we are just getting round to analysing exactly what is happening with that spend in schools. I find that shocking, and I think that our teachers and parents across Scotland will find it shocking as well.
This Government promised to close the poverty-related attainment gap a decade ago, but it has failed to deliver. It already presides over massive disparities in attendance rates, which are still well below pre-Covid levels, and it has allowed violence and bad behaviour in our classrooms to rise. The Scottish National Party Government promised a Parliament of Covid recovery in education, yet five years later, we have, in the cabinet secretary’s words, only just turned a corner. Scotland’s once-excellent schooling system has been undermined by the SNP over the past two decades, and the latest reporting is just the latest evidence for it. [Interruption.]
I hear the First Minister groaning. He had quite a lot to do with it, from memory—
Ask a question, please, Mr O’Kane.
As a former teacher, does the cabinet secretary think that it is acceptable to spend less than £1 per child per week on classroom supplies? How has that happened on her watch when she promised Covid recovery?
Like Mr O’Kane, I agree that Governments should protect and enhance education spending. That is why, in last year’s Scottish Government budget, this SNP Government did exactly that, with a resource increase of more than 3 per cent. We provided extra money to councils for more teachers and additional support needs and we provided a record settlement to local government. Scottish Labour’s response to that record increase for the education portfolio was to sit on its hands.
This year, we hear from Mr O’Kane’s boss, Anas Sarwar, that Scottish Labour is
“not in a strong negotiating position”
over the budget. In a Parliament of minorities, members on the SNP benches might have expected that Scottish Labour was in a prime position to force the hand of this Government. Instead, just like last year, it opts out. That is a dereliction of duty from the Scottish Labour Party. It is happy to opine over FOIs and press comment, but when it comes down to it, it cannot even bring itself to push the button to secure more investment for Scotland’s schools.
We all know that it is crucial that Scotland’s classrooms provide positive learning environments to support children and young people. How is the Scottish Government funding improvement to the pupil teacher ratio and, in turn, learning environments, as well as addressing the cost of the school day for those children who are most impacted by poverty?
As I have set out, thanks to additional investment that was secured in last year’s budget and the efforts of education authorities, the census data that was published in December showed an increase in the number of teachers in our schools for the first time since 2022, which is to be welcomed. It also showed an improvement in pupil teacher ratios. Our continued investment in relation to the Scottish attainment challenge over the past decade is helping to drive improvements at local authority level and in our schools, as is evidenced by the very welcome progress that we saw in the data on achievement in curriculum for excellence levels, which was published in December.
Previous
Time for ReflectionNext
Budget 2026-27