Chamber and committees

I thank the cabinet secretary for the advance sight of her statement and a copy of the letter from Ferguson’s that was sent to the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee.

The Auditor General’s report is scathing. It should make uncomfortable reading for ministers and, frankly, they should be ashamed. We now learn from the cabinet secretary that, as well as further delays, extra costs of at least £8.7 million will be involved in the project to deliver ferries 801 and 802.

I am not going to give a big preamble, because we will come to a debate on ferries later, so I have just a few questions. Based on what the cabinet secretary has told us and what is in the Auditor General’s report, there is a bit of confusion over costs. The Auditor General says that

“the total cost of the ... project is currently estimated to be at least £240 million”,

which is significantly more than the cabinet secretary told us.

In addition to that, who is to blame for the cabling problem? I might have this wrong, but the cabinet secretary seems to suggest that it was the people who put the cabling in. I do not think that that is true. I think that the problem happened after the cables went in. Can the cabinet secretary give a clear and simple answer to that question?

Finally, on the report from the Auditor General, why did ministers ignore CMAL’s advice not to award the contract to Ferguson’s? Will the cabinet secretary now agree to hold a public inquiry?

No.

There was then the £45 million loan to FMEL; we do not know what good that did. As things went belly up, the Government decided to nationalise the yard, but it had absolutely no idea what the condition of the boats was when it did so, so it could not have predicted how costs would rise.

Despite advice from PWC, there was no exit strategy—a bit like the situation with Prestwick airport. That is scandalous. Throughout the process, the various parties have been squabbling like children, unable to get on. There have been a string of disasters, with the latest being the discovery that the cables that were fitted on the vessel that was launched with blacked-out windows by Nicola Sturgeon in 2017 are now too short.

No one has accepted blame for that, or for anything in this fiasco. Ministers and others—including the highly paid and mistitled turnaround director—have moved on, but nobody’s head has rolled. That is the problem. There is no accountability—none—not just in Ferguson’s, but in the entire ferry system and especially in Government. To get to the bottom of that, we need a public inquiry.

There is a telling sentence in the Audit Scotland report, which states:

“The two new vessels, and subsequent additions and disposals, were expected to reduce the average age of CMAL’s major vessel fleet from 21 years ... to 12 years by 2025.”

How are we doing on that? The average age of the CalMac Ferries Ltd fleet is 23 years. The situation has got worse, and nobody’s head has rolled. We need new ferries, and we need to increase the budget for that in order to catch up. Graeme Dey reckoned that it would take £1.5 billion over 10 years; we are saying that it requires £1.4 billion. That would create a pipeline of work that could herald a boost for Scottish shipbuilding.

This is not some obscure topic. Having an ageing and unreliable ferry fleet affects people’s lives. This week, I have been speaking to island campaigners on Arran, Mull and Iona. A psychotherapist told me that he is dealing with increasing numbers of stressed-out patients. Other people have said that they have not been able to get to hospital appointments, because they cannot book a car space less than a few weeks in advance. The situation is also affecting tourism.

I have heard of bare shelves in shops, and I have seen the photographic evidence. Farmers cannot get feed and cannot get their animals to market. It goes on. Kids cannot get to school. People are thinking of giving up island life altogether—under the SNP.

I am grateful. Does the minister recognise concerns that £580 million is nowhere near enough and that the budget needs to be at least doubled?

As the cabinet secretary will be aware, it is Scottish National Party cuts that have led to councils considering the shared leadership model. In Labour-run North Lanarkshire, the council is looking at shared leadership for schools in the Chryston area. Does she share the concerns of parents there that that could lead to a drop in the quality of education?

I think that a war on motorists is going on and that the Government wants to make it so difficult to own and drive a car that people just give up.

What the Government does not have is a plan to make the alternatives to cars better. Councils will finally get the powers to run bus services, but the regulations will not be through until next year. It is not clear whether councils will get financial help—we must assume not—so it will be some years before anything worth while happens, if at all.

On active travel—walking, cycling and wheeling—we have to pin our hopes on speedy delivery. Where better to turn than the second strategic transport projects review, still in its draft stage. It talks about “active freeways”, which is an American word. Active freeways are described as segregated active travel routes on main travel corridors. It all sounds good, but no one I talked to seems to know what that means and where the first one, earmarked for 2025, will be.

By 2025, at least £320 million, or 10 per cent of the total transport budget, should be allocated to active travel, which is a major increase in a very short space of time. I welcome that, but it will be councils that deliver on it, and, apart from Glasgow and Edinburgh, councils do not have the resources to deliver at scale. This is a serious issue, and I ask the minister what he intends to do about it.

As the minister acknowledged, we can see good and bad schemes across the country. In my view, some of the infrastructure that has been put in in Glasgow is very good. Edinburgh, which Jeremy Balfour will talk about, has been less impressive. Edinburgh has steamrollered schemes through, bypassing troublesome councillors and communities, and making, frankly, a right pig’s ear of it on some things.

In my town of East Kilbride, I have seen spaces for people money spent on a particular short route that took months and is a confusing dog’s breakfast of weird lines and colours. Nobody can work out what it is about. We need sensible national standards that people can work to. Where councils do not have the staff, time or money, we should help them out. That is what needs to happen.

Our amendment talks about the need to train children how to ride bikes, which is where bikeability, which I mentioned earlier, comes in. There are still too many schools—more than half—that do not offer on-road training. We need to do better. As a former councillor who has taken part in bikeability sessions, I know that, sometimes, it is teachers who need the training to deliver the schemes.

Electric bikes are becoming more and more popular, but, just like electric cars, they need to be charged. There is currently no network for that, if someone is out and about and doing a longer journey. I suggest that the minister looks at that.

STPR2 is a typically woolly document. We do not really know what it means, but it needs to align with other policies, for instance on planning.

The cross-party group on sustainable transport, which I chair, is doing a piece of work on what the Government needs to do to achieve its ambitions. Our conclusions, when they are made, could be challenging for us all. However, I will share them with the minister, and it would be good if I could bring them to the chamber. My conclusion is that we need less navel gazing and word spin, and more wheel spin. We need substance and we need it fast.

I move amendment S6M-03650.3, to leave out from “the Scottish” to end and insert:

“increased spending on active travel as called for by the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party and others; believes that cycling, walking and wheeling can contribute to people’s health and wellbeing; further believes that every schoolchild should have the opportunity to benefit from cycle training; welcomes moves to encourage people to travel, particularly short distances, without the use of a motor vehicle, but accepts that for many people the car is essential; believes that increasing rates of active travel can help to fight climate change, but calls on the Scottish Government to ensure that local authorities have the necessary resources to improve their active travel infrastructure, and further believes that failing to do so will run the risk that there will be a postcode lottery of exemplar projects in Scotland.”

Will the member take an intervention?

Will the minister gave way?

During the debate, we heard about some excellent projects around the country. Does Colin Smyth agree that the best projects are the ones where councils bring communities with them rather than imposing on communities projects that do not particularly work because they have not been thought out properly?

This is the first transport debate that Patrick Harvie has led since he was elevated to the heights of becoming a Government minister, so it was with eager anticipation that I prepared for it. I imagined that the de facto Deputy First Minister would be spelling out a list of his achievements and laying out specific actions to come, with delivery dates and costings. We would expect that the new kind of politics that was promised by Mr Harvie and Ms Slater would usher in a waffle-free era in which vagueness is banished to the dustbin—or the incinerator, for this is a Scottish National Party-Green Scotland where there is still no moratorium on those.

It is with some exasperation, therefore, that I discover that Mr Harvie has very quickly settled into his new role by reading the SNP ministerial rulebook. Rule 1 is “Turn up to photo calls for projects that you have had no hand in and take the credit anyway”—we had that at Bowline. Rule 2 is “Talk big, but don’t deliver”. Rule 3 is “Consultations and buzz words, please, but no promises—the electors won’t notice”. Then we have Mr Harvie’s own personal rules. Harvie rule 1 is “Don’t change how you act now you’re a minister”. Actually, that is it. We saw that when he refused to wear a helmet when turning up for a ministerial photo shoot for a bikeability event.

I have listened to the minister speak, and I have to say that I am disappointed. He and I share the same ambitions on active travel, but let us be clear: there is a huge gap between what the Government says is its ambition and the actual delivery on the ground, and that has been the case for years.

Mr Harvie might wish to take credit for getting the SNP to agree with our position that 10 per cent of the transport budget should be spent on active travel. However, he is now responsible for making sure that it happens. I wish him every success, and he might wish to work with other parties to achieve that. If he wants to reach out to me, I am all ears. I reach out to him now—let us work together on this one area of policy where we agree.

Travel of all forms—as you know, Presiding Officer—is interlinked, so I will not talk just about active travel. The Scottish Government wants to see a 20 per cent reduction in car miles by 2030. It wants to see us all, within eight years, using cars a fifth less than we do now. How that is going to happen we do not know. I do not think that anyone in Transport Scotland knows, and I suspect that the minister does not know either.

I can hear the minister chuntering where he is seated. Does Liam Kerr agree with me that the challenge is not so much about giving councils large amounts of money as about whether those councils have the resources to deliver once they have that money? A lot of councils have been hollowed out in terms of their staffing and they do not have specialists in this area.