Chamber and committees

Thank you, Presiding Officer. I am pleased to be able to rise to speak in this debate.

I will try to address the matter and put some flesh on the bones, because I spent a huge amount of time as convener of the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee in session 5 looking at the procurement of vessels 801 and 802. I also had the privilege—if you can call it that—of having seen most of the documents on which the BBC based last night’s programme.

I will start off by talking about the contract bid. Let us be clear about this: CalMac gave its requirements to CMAL. They were quite considerable requirements, running to some 400-odd pages. They were not all perfect; in fact, some of them were strange. For example, CalMac asked for passenger cabins on the ferries, when there were to be no passenger cabins on these boats—but there they were, in the document.

That document was then distilled down into a 350-page document that formed the basis of Ferguson’s bid. Interestingly, if you look through it—or if you were able to flick your eyes quickly over it as the BBC were showing it—you will see that single words had been changed. For example, the word “should” had been changed to “will”. CalMac said that it “should” have something, while Ferguson’s said that it “will” have it. That is not really very clever.

What is also not clever is duplicating the errors in the original contract. For example, it was put in that there would be passenger cabins on the ferry, although we know that they were never part of it. We also found out that, as part of the tender process, the boat that was put forward by Ferguson’s was overpriced and overweight.

What I do not understand—and what I will fail to understand until the day I die—is why no one picked that up. Why did no one see that the biggest part of the document, which was about what the ferry would consist of, was pure duplication? The Government is telling us that it did not know, but I am not sure that I can go with that.

Let us look at the builders refund guarantee. In December 2014, Ferguson’s said that it would be incapable of producing a builders refund guarantee. It gave two reasons for that: it was a new business, and it had not developed a relationship with a bank. It said to CMAL in December that it could not do it. That was in the middle of the process, and yet Ferguson’s was able to continue with the process and was eventually awarded the contract—with no refund guarantee.

What does it mean to have no refund guarantee? It means that if everything goes wrong, one person has to pick up the costs. There is only one person who can pick up the costs for that, and it is not CMAL—it is the Scottish Government. If you are telling me that the Scottish Government did not know that it was going to be the lender of last resort when it all went wrong, I, frankly, do not believe you.

I also point out that CMAL was particularly nervous about that, and I am sure that it mentioned the issue to the Government, because it suggested that, as Ferguson’s bought the parts, they would become the property of CMAL and would not belong to Ferguson’s at all. As CMAL paid during the contract, it was taking control of the parts. That is an odd thing to do, so nobody should tell me that CMAL did not warn the Scottish Government. I believe that it must have done.

Then we got to the stage of the retender. Quite simply, the boat that was put forward was the wrong size—it was too heavy and cost too much. What did CMAL do? It said, “Well, you mentioned another boat and said it was no good, but we think it’s an excellent boat and we’d like you to tender on the principle of that.” That is what happened, and that is the boat that ended up being designed. Are people telling me that the Scottish Government did not know that? I do not believe that.

We started off with 15 staged payments and ended up with 18. When there are more staged payments, it probably means that the business that is getting the payments is in trouble and is financially unreliable. What happened then? In March 2017, the yard was nearly bankrupt, so CMAL said that it would release only part of the staged payments to the yard and that, when the yard could prove that the contractors who were owed money had been paid, CMAL would give a bit more of the staged payments. CMAL was trying to deliver the money to the yard and to make sure that the contractors were paid so that the yard did not go into receivership. However, at the same time, Derek Mackay was round the back with a van shoving £15 million into Ferguson’s and then another £30 million, making a mockery of that.

The Government can claim that it did not understand that the yard was close to being bankrupt. I would ask why ministers did not know that, but ministers cannot claim that they did not know that their Government was dishing out unsecured loans to Ferguson Marine.

I am running out of time, but I will look briefly at Tim Hair, who cost us £2 million and was interviewed on the telephone. He came to the business with a lot of knowledge—he had been an engineer on a cruise liner for a couple of years and had never built a ship in his life. It is always said of turnaround directors that, for the first six months of a contract, they are part of the problem and, after that, they become the problem. That is what happened, and that is why we are seeing the delays to the ferries that we are seeing at the moment.

In summary, we understand that crucial financial requirements were waived to allow only one bidder. The tender specification documents were given to only one bidder. The chance to retender and reduce the price was given to only one bidder. The tender happened to be awarded to a loyal Monegasque supporter. Staged payments were adapted to allow money to go into the yard—

—and unsecured loans were agreed.

Katy Clark mentioned the issue of decision time, which is something that we need to discuss. I believe that limiting a debate to a set time is wrong, although that might mean that decision time is carried forward to the next day. That might be worth considering.

In summary, the Parliament needed to evolve, and it has evolved. We need to go further and make our IT work for parliamentarians. However, our IT can never replace the Parliament, and we should never lose sight of the fact that the best way to work together as a Parliament and as parties—which might have different ideas—is by sitting down, talking to one another, trying to find consensus and realising that we do not have a monopoly on good ideas.

Of course I will give way.

Unsurprisingly, as a member of the committee, I think that our report is spot on and I thank the clerking team and the convener for all their support in driving the inquiry forward. I welcome the debate, which I have found really interesting. I think we all agree that Parliament must embrace change and that change must always protect the core values on the basis of which the Parliament was set up.

The biggest change that we have experienced recently is the introduction of virtual technology in the chamber. That was forced on us by the pandemic. If we are honest, the technology in Parliament prior to the pandemic was poor and remote working would not have been possible. I remember holding a committee meeting in a room below the canteen, with five committee members huddled round a screen trying to take evidence from witnesses from Transport for London. They could not see us and we could hardly see them.

We have been through a change that was really important because it stopped our democracy from becoming an autocracy, but we struggled as we went through that change. Members will never forget the technical issues that led to voting delays in the “robust” system that we were told we were working with. There was also a complete disconnect in delivering virtual speeches without being able to see a live feed to the chamber. I speak from experience, having been forced into remote working for six months. It was perhaps pleasing in my case to look at the screen and see myself, but I would have liked to see how the speech was going down in the chamber, which was not possible, and it was certainly not possible to take interventions.

The on-going development of the hybrid Parliament is something that we can now control, as we should. I am pleased to hear that MSPs who are attending debates virtually after recess will be able to make interventions and will actually be able to see how their speech is going down in the chamber, which I think is really important. It will stop them feeling detached, because you do feel detached if you are speaking to a computer for what seems to be hours on end, if you get the chance and the Presiding Officer does not cut you off. There is a lot to be done on that.

I do not think that having virtual meetings of Parliament should stop parliamentarians from coming in. To my mind, it remains crucial to attend Parliament physically. You cannot bump into someone for a coffee or sound them out on an idea on Zoom—that just does not happen. To me, that is what politics is all about: meeting and talking to people and building trust and cross-party relationships. Hybrid working can complement that, but it will never replace the ability to look someone in the eye and see how things are going.

Another way in which Parliament could improve the system would be by allowing proxy voting. There has been a lot of talk about that. I concur by saying, as a former member of a whip’s team, that it is not the place of whips to hold the proxy vote. That vote should be held by someone that the person who gives it believes will represent their views.

I believe that we have failed to address the issue of how parliamentary business is carried out. I believe that the domination of business by the Parliamentary Bureau is not satisfactory. I ask members who are present if they have ever been to a Bureau meeting. You can go if you want to. You have to ask permission and get approval from the whips, but you ought to go and to see whether it is as edifying as you think it might, or might not, be.

My other big bugbear, which we have not discussed, is that members come to this chamber with prepared speeches along party lines and with patsy questions. I do not believe that many members are prepared to take interventions or to engage. Debate is about just that: it is about debating issues and having an informed discussion. I think that is really important and I think that Parliament needs to mature to allow that to happen.

Has the committee, which I was on previously, fully considered how members who are attending virtual committee meetings should get classified papers, given that it is not possible to send them out in advance by email under the current parliamentary system?

Of course, and Mr Johnson will not be surprised that I now come to do that, and I am sure that the deputy convener will also do exactly that.

I agree with the convener that we should be looking forward 10 years, and I agree with the minister that it should not be the Government that dictates the way in which the Parliament changes. I also agree with Stephen Kerr that Parliament should agree on and make the changes that it wants to see.

I was delighted to hear from Jackson Carlaw that he is progressive and open to change. He did actually have quite a lot to say, despite the fact that, at the beginning, he thought that he would not.

There is one area that I would like to drift on to—

Will the member take an intervention?

Centralised vaccination centres simply do not work in rural areas. One house-bound and vulnerable elderly couple in Strathspey have been given their appointments on two different days in two different locations, with one being asked to make an eight-hour round trip of 70 miles to Inverness. That does not fit in with the cabinet secretary’s statement to provide more local centres. I favour GPs in rural areas rolling out vaccines, as they did earlier in the pandemic. If GPs are willing to do that, is the cabinet secretary willing to support them?

The answer is that they will be delivered on the latest timescale and on the latest budget. We know that there is only £30 million left in the budget pot and at least another 15 months of build time, so, to be frank, an overspend is probably inevitable.

Given the latest disastrous information on harbour upgrades, in what year will both ferries be operational on their planned routes?