Chamber and committees

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but given the seriousness of the issues that were at play in the college, would not it have been far better for the college to have made sure that the board was fully aware of its roles and responsibilities at that stage?

Good morning. I have some questions about the composition, roles and capabilities of the board. However, before I do that, I have a technical question.

On 30 September, the tenure of four board members ended, and the board’s membership therefore fell below the numbers that are required by statute. However, the board met on 4 November. Given that it was not statutorily competent at that point, what status did that meeting have?

Did you ask or get any indication as to why inductions did not take place virtually?

You say that the variation is not particularly significant, so you would not have concerns, but someone in Scotland who earns £50,000 will pay £1,489.10 more in tax than someone in the rest of the UK who earns £50,000. Given that there is always compliance, evasion and avoidance, at what level of variance would you start to have significant concerns and think that you would need to probe deeper into the data?

With regard to retention, can you tell us briefly about the exit interviews that you carry out? When someone leaves NHS Highland, what do they typically say is their reason for leaving?

That is critical, and the issue appears to be common to other health boards, too. If we are having a recruitment and retention crisis, it is vital that we capture the reasons for people leaving the profession.

What efforts are you putting into the creation of a more sustainable workforce model and dealing with the fact that you are competing all the time with other areas of Scotland that might not have the same rurality or cost of living issues? What more could the Scottish Government and NHS Scotland do to support health boards such as NHS Highland that cannot compete equally with boards in other parts of the country?

Thank you convener, and good morning Mr Boyle. Last week, Mr Boyle, you expressed your frustration that you cannot get to the full facts and the heart of the ferrygate scandal. We are barely a week into our inquiries and I think that some members already share that frustration. Key documents cannot be found or were not prepared. Key witnesses have been gagged. There are reports of possible fraud and corruption. Scotland’s former First Minister has gone as far as saying that we should be calling in the cops. Today, Erik Østergaard, the chairman of the Government’s ferries quango when the deal was done, has said that CMAL was given written confirmation to proceed with awarding the contract to Ferguson Marine, but it was not given any written confirmation of why that was the case. As with all scandals, there is perhaps now some whiff of a cover-up, with people and possibly even Government ministers covering their tracks. We are only one week into our inquiries, and I do share your sense of frustration.

However, we are not alone. Jim McColl, who we should not forget was once a pal of the Scottish National Party—he had the First Minister on speed dial and was one of the Government’s favourite Scottish businessmen—is clearly frustrated; his submission to the committee is stark and points to more than just a fallout among friends in the nationalist movement. He says that the procurement process was driven by a party-political dynamic and was rushed to deliver headlines for the SNP conference; he also says that CMAL’s concerns were not conveyed to him and that not enough time was given to the feasibility of the conceptual design. If that were the case, it would be very serious indeed. In fact, we would be talking about corruption of the procurement process and it would explain why things since then went badly wrong and why ministers potentially have been keen to cover their tracks.

In the absence of any documentary evidence to disprove all that, how concerned should we be about the original process being conducted along such lines? If Mr McColl’s claims are true, does that explain why we have seen such resistance to full and total transparency at a critical point in this process?

I do not want to dwell on the original procurement process, because I recognise that that was a matter for the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee and that your report does not go into it. That said, Parliament still has questions to ask on it and answers should be forthcoming, because there is still something suspect about the scoring of and emphasis in the tendering matrix process.

However, your report covers three critical points in the development of the vessels that I think could be revisited. They are moments when the Government could have got a grip, stemmed the spending and ensured that the ships were properly procured, but, for whatever reason—and possibly to keep covering its tracks—the Government did not go down that route. The first was when Ferguson Marine suddenly announced that it could not offer a full 100 per cent builder’s refund guarantee. In the interests of transparency and fairness, which are critical to any procurement process, should the Government not at that stage through CMAL have reopened the tendering process to the other five bidders or at least informed them that the playing field had changed significantly? Do you know whether that was considered or whether other bidders were informed at that stage of that material change to the procurement contract?

Let us bypass some of what then happened and fast forward to June 2018. It is reported in annex B of paper 3 that FMEL asked the Scottish Government to intervene to instruct CMAL to take part in an expert determination process to resolve the growing dispute between the procurement agency and the yard. FMEL managers said that CMAL did not do that because CMAL had something over ministers—that they had forced CMAL to do the deal with Ferguson Marine in the first place.

Reflecting on your report’s account of that period, FMEL’s management says that you have accepted the Government’s “false narrative” and “fabulous propaganda” that the failure of the project was supposedly down to FMEL and not down to flaws that flowed from the procurement and design process being rushed because ministers wanted McColl’s yard to be given the contract and they wanted that to be done quickly.

In his submission, Mr McColl goes on to say that the Government did not intervene to instruct CMAL to take part in an expert determination process because that would have been “very damaging” to the Government, because CMAL’s board had threatened “to resign en masse” and blow the lid off what really happened in relation to the awarding of the contract.

Have you seen any evidence of that? Rather than going down the route of an EDP, would that not have been another point at which the Government could have revisited the procurement and delivery of the ferries?

There was a final point when the procurement process could have been reopened and a different decision could have been taken, which was when the Government determined that it would nationalise the yard. In your report, you say that the decision to nationalise the yard was taken

“without a full and detailed understanding of the amount of work required to complete the vessels, the likely costs, or the significant operational challenges at the shipyard.”

Again, the Government pressed on regardless. How concerned are you that the Government proceeded with nationalisation on that basis? What were the financial consequences and the consequences relating to the on-going construction of the vessels?