Chamber and committees

Okay.

My view is that this could be a police matter. Do you have a role, if people want to come to you in confidence with information?

Thank you very much, convener. It is good to be back at the committee. I served on the Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee in the previous session, but I should say that I have no relevant interests to declare—I do not think that what is declared carries over from one session to another.

It has been interesting to listen to the lines of questioning from members. I will pick up on some of what has been said, but I also have questions of my own. I have been aware of concerns about the college for some time now, and I have been approached by people at the college. Willie Coffey asked about the impact on staff. I have been an elected member—both as a councillor and as an MSP—for some time, and I have never come across a situation in which people are as scared as they are in this case. That applies to current staff and former staff. I have never seen anything like it. I will give the committee some background to that, because it has not had it yet.

Craig Hoy mentioned the meeting on 4 November last year, at which there were six new board members. Of course, that was the meeting at which the principal, Aileen McKechnie, and the interim clerk to the board, Brian Keegan, were suspended. There is a question about whether a board with six new members who had not gone through proper training should have taken such a big decision. A representative of the Scottish Funding Council was also present at that meeting. Was that appropriate?

It sounds as though there have been no lessons learned. I have been nagging the minister for weeks to publish the project Neptune report. If she published it, we could start to have a conversation about how we procure ferries. When will she publish it? There is no barrier to that now, so she could do it next week.

We wanted to call this debate “Ferries Fiasco”, but parliamentary staff told us that we could not. The debate might not be called “Ferries Fiasco” in the Business Bulletin, but that is what it is about.

The Scottish Conservatives used our previous debating time to talk about ferries. Had anything changed since then, we could have gone on to something else. However, we still do not know why the Scottish National Party Government awarded the contract to build vessels 801 and 802 to Ferguson Marine Engineering Ltd against the advice of its in-house experts and despite its posting hundreds of documents. We have had the very sad sight of the United Kingdom forces hero Keith Brown beating a hasty retreat from Her Majesty’s press the other week, sidestepping their battle lines to slink into the cover of the Scottish Parliament canteen.

Mr Brown later gave a less than satisfactory interview with Channel 4 news, in which he said:

“That document, the one that signed it off, if it ever existed, is not now available but it was quite clear from associated documents that it was approved and approved by the minister for transport.”

Work that one out: a document—“if it ever existed”—that signed off the decision. Perhaps the minister can tell us now whether the document that Mr Brown referred to existed.

The silence speaks volumes, Presiding Officer. Mr Brown remembered the script after that and again blamed Derek Mackay, who, at the time of the decision, was the lowly Minister for Transport and Islands, and Mr Brown was his boss. The idea that Derek would not to talk to Keith, who would not talk to John, who signed the cheques, who would not run it past Nicola, is preposterous, particularly when the SNP had an announcement to make at its conference. Derek, Keith, John and Nicola: the Ferries Four—a very dodgy group with no hits to its name.

There is a real and enduring stench of cover-up. The SNP’s secrecy is appalling and corrupt. We do not know why the yard got the contract, but it did. Nicola Sturgeon says that the Government saved the jobs at the yard. The yard could have continued if it had not been given that ill-fated contract. There is no reason to think otherwise.

The yard had work—that is a fact. I believe, and Jim McColl believes, that the yard could have continued. We can be pretty certain that the yard will not take on anything of that scale again, whatever the future holds. However, we do not know what the future holds for the yard, because the Government cannot make up its mind.

I will take an intervention from Mr McKee because he never gives us any answers to questions.

There was work at the yard. It had work and it could have taken on more work.

Presiding Officer, the debate has moved on a little since we last discussed the issue in Parliament; I must be fair about that. For example, we have discovered that the FMEL deal might have breached European state aid rules because the Government did not tell the European Union about an incentive of around £106 million to ensure that the work went to Ferguson’s.

We know that figures such as the hugely respected Jim Sillars and the former First Minister Jack McConnell believe that the failure to come clean on the decision-making process might have broken the law on several fronts.

We also know that only one in five Scots think that the SNP is doing a good job of running ferry services. Those one in five people need to get out more if they think that, because most do not share that view.

We have discovered another thing, too. Stewart Hosie thinks that ferries 801 and 802 are “a little late” and that money has not been wasted. Five years and more than 2.5 times over budget sounds more than “a little late”, and it certainly sounds like waste to me. It is that sort of attitude that has got us to where we are.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. In relation to the announcement that the Minister for Transport made earlier about the missing email, the first that I have seen of the document was on Twitter. I have just seen it now. That is disrespectful to the Parliament.

Will the minister give way?