I am delighted to open the debate as convener of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee. I thank the committee’s clerks and its members for all their hard work in producing what I believe is an excellent report.

Let us be clear: too many of Scotland’s ferry services are below standard. Over 15 and a half months, the committee conducted an inquiry into how the situation could be improved. The question that we needed to answer was what could be done to constitute a modern and sustainable ferry service for Scotland. It was very much a forward-looking, solutions-based inquiry, which was designed to go beyond the specific problems with delivering the much-needed ferries 801 and 802. Those issues are being dealt with very ably by the Public Audit Committee, and I pay tribute to the work that it is doing on behalf of the Parliament in relation to those ferries.

The catalyst for our committee’s inquiry was a petition, which led to engagement with ferry-dependent communities. The need was established when we engaged with communities, which helped to shape the remit of our work to come. We visited Orkney, Arran and the Western Isles to meet community groups and we received hundreds of written submissions. However, we never lost focus on the human cost of unreliable ferries. I whole-heartedly thank all the people who contributed to the committee’s work on the inquiry. They told us to be bold, to end the endless cycle of meaningless consultations, and to deliver a commanding and compelling case for change. I believe that we have delivered that through the recommendations of our report, which emphasise the need for strong leadership from the Scottish Government, which has been lacking.

I am delighted that Fiona Hyslop, the ex-deputy convener of the committee during most of its inquiry, is now involved as a Government minister. She knows the challenges and I hope that she will rise to them. Sadly, however, the Scottish Government has allowed responsibility for various aspects of ferry services to fall within the portfolios of three cabinet secretaries. Therefore, it is still unclear who has ultimate responsibility for delivering the leadership and the long-term strategic thinking that the committee recommended. That is unhelpful and muddled.

The committee made a series of recommendations that were designed to progress improvement of the management of our ferries and the contracts for running them. I will begin with our recommendation on the structure for decision making on and delivery of ferry services. There was widespread agreement that the current tripartite agreement for managing the Scottish Government-funded ferries is not working effectively, especially for the Clyde and Hebrides ferries. The Scottish Government is considering the various options for reconfiguration, as outlined in the project Neptune report. The committee has recommended that the future of Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd must be considered. I make no bones about the fact that I believe that CMAL’s standing as an independent organisation should be ended, but the committee has offered various other options for its future role, including mergers with Caledonian MacBrayne and Transport Scotland. We believe that the status quo is completely unacceptable.

However, the underlying issue is the lack of clarity on whether the Scottish Government can amend the tripartite agreement. The project Neptune report was delivered to the Scottish Government in February 2022 and the matter is still to be resolved. The cabinet secretary does not appear to know whether the tripartite agreement can be amended. I suggest that we need a clear answer to that before we go any further—time is marching on. The next Clyde and Hebrides ferries contract is an opportunity to improve services by asking more from the operator in order to improve services and reliability. We need to grasp the opportunity to benefit the ferry-dependent communities.

I have some fundamental questions. When will the new contract start? Will it be awarded through a tender process or will it be awarded directly? Does the Scottish Government know whether a direct award could be made? We posed those questions in our report. We are 11 months away from the end of the current Clyde and Hebrides ferries contract.

There has been a lack of action on procurement, which will be resource intensive. Audit Scotland has warned that previous procurement exercises did not allow sufficient time. The committee is concerned that lessons have not been learned. Without endorsing how we get there, the committee felt that, from the current starting point, a direct award would have some advantages. As laid out in the project Neptune report, a direct award may save the resources of Transport Scotland and CalMac and allow ministers to focus on strategy. However, there is an important caveat. We stipulated that if our recommendation was carried forward, it must be done with the acceptance of communities. In September 2022, the then transport minister said the same thing.

The report of the chair of the ferries community board, which sadly did not come out until after our report, recommended that operator services should be put out to tender. The question that we have to ask now, and which I hope will be answered, is what is the Government’s view on that? Will the Government make an offer to extend the CalMac contract, given that there is now insufficient time for a tendering process of the magnitude necessary to end the current contract? What will it do?

The committee also recommended that the Scottish Government should consider extending the length of future contracts. The committee also considered the forthcoming islands connectivity plan as a strategy to replace the ferries plan, which ended in 2022. That plan currently consists of a series of proposed plans. The first—the long-term plan for vessels and ports—was published in a draft for consultation in 2022. The Scottish Government’s response to our report said that the revised draft of that plan will be published later this year.

I will if I have time.

I appreciate that the minister has been in her role for six months. Is she now in a position to tell us what she is going to do about the award of the new contract? Will the contract go out to tender or will it just be awarded to CalMac? We would like to know, because that is a key question.

Will the member give way?

I thank Alex Rowley for giving way. There are lots of permutations, but does he agree that, given that the Government does not know what it is legally entitled to do at this stage, we are stuck, with nowhere to go?

I will keep my comments brief, Presiding Officer. I remind members of my entry in the register of members’ interests—I have a 500-acre farm in Moray. Before anyone makes any comments, I do not have an estate, although I did spend 15 years managing estates.

I want to make a point to people who have spent time criticising estates. Most rural estates that I managed—and there were quite a few—that did not have hydro or wind farms had to rely on the owner’s income to make things happen. It was not unusual for me to go back to some of the bigger estates annually to ask the owner for £600,000 or more to make the estate function over the next year. That £600,000 is not pre-taxed—it is taxed income that the owner has to provide to make the estate work. We need to understand that and the fact that a lot of owners have altruistic motives. We can argue whether foreign estate owners are the right people to own land but, without them, there would be no estates and we would not be achieving the amount that is being achieved.

I will conclude with this: having been involved in the management of upland estates, I weep when I leave the chamber in the evening, having heard people pontificate about how they know about managing an estate, managing deer or peatland management from reading about it in a book. They should get out there on the ground and do it. It is hard work, and they might learn more from doing that than they will from just getting ink on their fingers.

Yes, I know. I am just laying that out because we see questions about investment in the industry and about the salaries of people who work for you. You might be getting £450,000 and Peter Farrer might be getting a little bit less at roughly £350,000. That is a huge amount of money, and I am just laying that out so that the public are aware of it.

I take all those points on board. My only comment is that there is no other water company in the UK that is owned directly and underwritten by the Scottish Government and the people of Scotland. They are the owners, whereas other companies have different ownership structures.

What is the maximum amount that you can get?

Of your salary?