Chamber and committees

I am sure that my friend would also note that, unlike in Scotland, the Polish Government offers generous patient finance to Polish shipbuilders through its state investment bank.

I was just reflecting on the minister’s intervention on my opening speech about greater collaboration. I note that the funding deadline for the initial tranche of Valour grants is 14 January, with a total of £27 million of funding and grants of up to £1 million being available. Will the minister write to the health and social care partnerships in Scotland to advise them of the scheme and perhaps invite them to apply? It could help with veterans’ GPs.

In the spirit of collaboration, I am more than happy to work as best as I can to be useful in liaising with UK Government colleagues on that. The recent announcement on defence housing in particular, and how we carry that over as part of our work with the veterans community, is really important. We will continue to work to support the work of the Scottish Veterans Commissioner and the Government, and we will be happy to support the Government’s motion, as amended, today.

I congratulate the Scottish Veterans Commissioner, retired Lieutenant Colonel Susie Hamilton—sorry, it is of course Lieutenant Commander Susie Hamilton, who was a naval officer, not an army officer, nor a marine—on her excellent progress report and on her work over the past few years in holding the Government and the Parliament to account on their efforts to improve the lives of veterans across the country.

As Edward Mountain said, around 4 per cent of our population are veterans. There is significant regional variation, with Moray top of the league table, given the concentration of Royal Air Force veterans in that community. It is important for us to recognise the significant regional focus. We should also recognise that half of those in the veteran population in Scotland are of working age and that they represent a significant store of value as citizens of this country. They are an immense store of knowledge and national resilience.

I have just returned from the international sea power conference held in London yesterday, at which the First Sea Lord set out, in stark terms the existential risk to the country’s safety that is posed by other state actors, most notably Russia. Given that situation, we need to consider national resilience in a way that we have not done in recent years, and our veterans community offers a significant vanguard group for us in that regard.

We must also consider the mixture of veterans in our community. Technically, I am a veteran, and 22 per cent of our veterans are reservists, so it is not all about regulars. We must also consider those who fought in hot conflict zones but who have not necessarily had the same support as their regular counterparts on returning from those zones. Especially for people around my age, we need to think about how they have dealt with that, the mental health impacts and the longer-term effects that it has had.

It is important to note that Lieutenant Commander Hamilton’s points in the report are all positive—there are no red actions. That is commendable and shows the united front that the Parliament has had in supporting the Government’s efforts in recent years, with this being the ninth debate on the issue, as the minister pointed out.

Lieutenant Commander Hamilton has, however, highlighted a number of key actions. She says that we need

“a more formalised structure to provide strategic leadership and direction in employability, skills and learning.”

That could be led in the public sector to a much greater degree than it is, particularly through organisations such as Social Security Scotland and the national health service, which are among Scotland’s biggest institutional employers. We could see a lot more formal direction and strategic leadership in public sector organisations to demonstrate best practice.

The commissioner recommends that we need

“Stronger oversight and clearer collaboration across public, private and third sector partners ... to drive sustained improvement.”

That is a reasonable recommendation, and I hope that the Government will set out detailed responses on how it intends to make progress on it.

On Mr Mountain’s point about the focus on veteran homelessness and housing, it is important that we recognise the risk there, particularly for veterans. A nomadic lifestyle typifies the service person, and it is important to provide stability for those who move on from service, particularly regular service. His proposal is, therefore, reasonable. We have liaised with UK Government colleagues on that issue and are minded to support the amendment. It is important that we work across Governments to realise that objective.

The Labour UK Government has announced a new UK-wide veteran support system called Valour, which is backed by £50 million of funding, to ensure that veterans have easier access to essential care and support. It is based on best practice, most notably that developed by the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen & Families Association, and Glasgow’s helping heroes service is an excellent benchmark of excellence. Scotland already has a one-stop-shop casework service at which veterans can present themselves without facing any impediments to receiving tailored support from people who are veterans themselves. We could do with having more of that excellent model in this country. The Valour scheme was established very much in that spirit. It is important to note that £27 million of the funding is going live for local bids, to turbocharge the system and ensure that veterans have easier access to essential care and support through the new support hubs. I hope that the Scottish Government will engage with UK Government counterparts to ensure that we make the most of that funding in Scotland and establish a comprehensive network in this country.

[Made a request to intervene.]

I commend the committee on its excellent work on Ferguson Marine and echo the sentiments of the convener in saying that the whole Parliament wants it to succeed. When we boil it down, the question is whether this country has the will to have a commercial shipbuilding industry. If we do, we need to be clear about what we need to do to achieve that objective national mission. Perhaps that was the Government’s original aim when it saved Ferguson Marine from liquidation in 2014.

I visited the yard a year later as an account manager for Scottish Enterprise. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only member of the Parliament with any direct industrial experience of shipbuilding, so I speak with some direct insight. I visited the yard when it was largely under demolition and Ferguson’s was constructing new facilities while simultaneously constructing a ship. Alarm bells immediately began ringing for me regarding the inherent risk of disruption to production during that process, challenges indeed emerged with hull 801 and hull 802, and the rest is history—as has been well rehearsed.

The question is where we go from here. We need to address some fundamental considerations. First Marine International, an excellent benchmarking organisation, has done a thorough analysis of Ferguson Marine’s facilities from end to end—from steel coming into the yard to the ships coming out, outfitted, at the other end. It has set out a series of recommendations, which I understand are commercially confidential, so neither the Government nor Ferguson has disclosed that information in the detail that I would perhaps like to see. Clearly, however, there is a prescription for investments, which will allow the yard to achieve upper-quartile performance, as FMI would describe it—as I know, having worked with it before in world shipbuilding. That will involve elements such as a panel line, overhead cranes, welding equipment, outfitting facilities and cranage.

There are a number of obvious issues with the shipyard’s layout. I walked the yard in great detail with David Tydeman, the former director, and we looked at some of the obvious issues. For example, in the module hall, the overhead cranes that were installed in the original upgrade in 2015 do not have a third hook, so it is not possible to lift and turn units of ships. Normally when you build a ship, you put the ceiling on the floor, you lay out the ventilation, the cabling and the complex pipework downhand, and you then turn the unit shipwise and stack it on the berth. It is not possible to do that in the module hall, because the cranes there were not specified properly. That is basic stuff—it is basic incompetence—which has cast a long shadow on the efficiency of the shipyard.

There are issues about the infrastructure that urgently need to be addressed. The £14 million or so of investment is so important for that reason, but I imagine that there is a lot more that needs to be done besides. The yard needs a comprehensive, end-to-end renovation to allow it to perform at an upper-quartile level. There are also wider considerations. It is basically not viable to build ships commercially in Scotland right now, because we do not address some of the fundamental issues.

Other countries have patient finance products offered through their national investment banks, which are standard across Europe. In Spain—where the Northern Lighthouse Board’s most recent vessel has just been completed—there is a tax leasing arrangement, whereby you can effectively stagger your VAT returns over a long period, so that, in effect, you get a 20 per cent reduction on the up-front price of the ship. Poland offers patient loan finance to 100 per cent of the value of the ship through its state investment bank. That means not having to chase milestone payments to cover the overhead of the shipyard, which is exactly the mess that Ferguson’s got itself into: chasing milestone payments while knowing that the design was not ready. It got itself into a right old guddle with that, which is why it is such a problem right now. If we had that patient financing, things could be carried out much more patiently and collaboratively.

There is also the issue of the demand signal. We are not converting state demand into domestic orders and domestic production, because of the laissez-faire procurement rules. We need to get that minimum 10 per cent social value baked into our future procurement cycles, which would create more of a demand signal to be converted into Scottish orders. If we can get some of those fundamentals correct, as well as specific investments in the yard, we have a good chance of making a success of commercial shipbuilding in Scotland.

The member might have noted that the commissioner said that she was disappointed by the slow uptake of the general practice armed forces and veterans recognition scheme. As a practising NHS GP, does he have any personal insights on what might improve uptake?

That was an important point about housing, which is critical not just to veterans but to sustaining people in service who might otherwise leave. The record investment of £9 billion in modernising more than 40,000 houses over the next decade could be a massive opportunity for the Scottish Government to engage in supercharging that around Scottish garrisons.

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to the Centre for Cities’ recent report, which recommended having a directly elected metro mayor for the greater Glasgow region. (S6O-05245)

I commend Mr Hepburn, the member for Cumbernauld and Kilsyth, for successfully securing this members’ business debate. I am pleased to support his motion. I commend his excellent speech celebrating the new town of Cumbernauld—that is, it is new relative to its bigger brother, Glasgow, which is celebrating its 850th anniversary this year. Nonetheless, there is a symbiotic relationship between the two places, because the new town of Cumbernauld as we know it today was born of a post-war goal to redistribute—or disperse—550,000 people from Glasgow to new towns across Scotland. That goal was visionary and ambitious in the scale of its attempt to address the severe issues caused by the rapid industrialisation of Glasgow in the previous century. Although there have been many positive aspects to that industrialisation, there have also been many challenging ones. If we view the history of industrial development and population dispersal in the round, as was alluded to by my colleague Mr Leonard, it is a story of mixed success for Scotland. We can learn some lessons from that.

The observation that Cumbernauld Development Corporation was an excellent vehicle for economic development is a key point. The dismantling of the corporation in the mid-1990s was regrettable—the regional councils and development corporations are sorely missed in Scotland’s landscape. A test of that is the only remaining development corporation in the country, Clyde Gateway, which is proving to be quite successful at driving investment in the east end of Glasgow. We could do with more such organisations in Scotland.