 The next item of business is a debate on motion 9.3.2.7, in the name of Richard Leonard, on new vessels for the Clyde and the Hebrides arrangements to deliver vessels 8.0.1 and 8.0.2. I would invite those members who would wish to speak in the debate to please press the request-to-speak buttons and I call on Richard Leonard to speak to and to move the motion on behalf of the Public Audit Committee. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and can I begin by reminding members of my register of interests and by thanking the clerks and staff for their tireless work on the production of this report. Today we debate the findings, the recommendations and the conclusions of the Public Audit Committee's report New Vessels for the Clyde and Hebrides arrangement to deliver vessels 8.0.1 and 8.0.2. It is a report grounded in the extensive evidence. We gathered over seven oral evidence sessions and from a wide range of written submissions. Now it is a matter of record that some of the evidence the committee took is the subject of dispute between the various parties who spoke to us, but what is not in dispute is that the people of Scotland and our island communities in particular have been badly let down, and that there has been a widespread failure of decision making and of leadership across government, across government agencies and by those previously running the yard, which goes back almost a decade. Let me tell you who else have been badly let down, those workers in that yard in Port Glasgow. They have witnessed highly paid managers, turnaround directors and countless external consultants and advisers all come and all go. When all of the time, if only they had been listened to, it is my sincerely held belief that these vessels would not have ended up being five years late and three and a half times over budget. Since the committee published its report at the end of March, there have been a few developments. We have had two transport ministers and now looking for a third, a new cabinet secretary, a new deputy First Minister and a new First Minister. In new leadership, a fresh start, the First Minister told us it is imperative that transparency underpins our approach to delivery. My government will ensure that the people of Scotland have the information they need to hold us to account, but governments are judged by what they do, not what they say they do. So I am duty bound to report to Parliament that, time after time, in the course of our investigations, we found poor record keeping of key decisions within the government. We heard of ministers up to and including the former First Minister, holding meetings with a private contractor behind closed doors, with no permanent civil servant present for which no minute exists. A senior member of the cabinet refused to answer the committee's questions until requested to do so for a third time. This should not just trouble the five members of the Public Audit Committee, it should trouble every single member of this Parliament. Delays occurred in securing the attendance of some senior civil servants. Delays occurred in receiving evidence from Transport Scotland, with little or no explanation provided for late or incomplete information. Correspondence, which could not be found for the committee, later turned up in response to a freedom of information review. So let me be as clear as I can be. If a committee of this Parliament seeks evidence from the Government, it should be provided in full. It should not be dependent on a member of the public or the press posing the same question. Taken together, those actions show a serious disregard for openness and transparency. They also demonstrate an unhealthy disrespect of the work of this Parliament, which makes it all the more disappointing that the Scottish Government's written response to the report that we are debating this afternoon was late, lacks any real substance or detail, and simply fails to address at all half of the conclusions and recommendations. No response on the role of Transport Scotland, no response on the procurement process, no response on ministerial conduct, no response. It was issued in the form of Transport Secretary's name, but in fairness to Kevin Stewart, he was acting on behalf of the whole Government. So there is a collective responsibility here, which I hope not only the Cabinet Secretary, but the First Minister will accept. The committee in our report also stressed the importance of full transparency around written ministerial authority. We therefore welcome the Cabinet Secretary's recent action. While we recognise that the value for money assessment by external advisers 10.0 may contain commercially confidential information, it is in the public interest. It is in keeping with, to use the First Minister's own phrase, the imperative of transparency that as much of this assessment as possible is published in the coming days. Our report also recognises the very serious allegations made in the BBC disclosure investigation, claims that FMEL was allowed to progress beyond the pre-qualification stage of the procurement process despite being unable to meet requirements that were mandatory, claims that FMEL also had preferential access to restricted technical information to help inform its tender bid. Of course, it is right and proper that these most serious allegations are thoroughly investigated, that there is a due process. But CMAL is wholly owned by Government ministers, which is why we call once again this afternoon for a commitment from the Government to share the findings of the KC-led inquiry with the Public Audit Committee and with this Parliament. We also call in the report for the Auditor General to undertake a comprehensive audit of the entire procurement process to audit the full cost of this project from start to finish once the vessels have been completed and to have a laser-like focus on the £128 million of public money that was paid out to FMEL by undertaking a forensic audit of all financial records to establish exactly where the money went. Before I finish, let me turn to the role of Transport Scotland. As we conclude in the report, the programme steering group which it led was weak and toothless. That despite having a critical role in communicating important information to Scottish Government ministers on CMAL's behalf, it appears to have repeatedly failed to do so. We were even told at one point that Transport Scotland had no role in the contract when it clearly had a central role in the contract, which is why we have fundamental deep-rooted concerns about Transport Scotland's position which the new Transport Minister must address. Finally, we were able to reach a significant degree of consensus in the report. The one area where there was some division is over the involvement of Scottish ministers. The majority of the committee concluded that it was wholly inappropriate for a Scottish minister in the middle of a live tendering exercise which he was overseeing to reply to a constituency MSP that alternatives to a full builders refund guarantee had previously been acceptable, because in so doing he compromised the integrity of the procurement process. Similarly, the former First Minister's decision to publicly announce the preferred bidder for the contract, even when in the words of her own media briefing, I quote, significant negotiations were still to be concluded, most certainly weakened CMAL's negotiating position with FML, not least over the builders refund guarantee. As a committee, we are clear that record and note keeping fell well short of what we would expect. So there is a failure of ministers, but it is a failure of the civil service too. So it is of course encouraging that the permanent secretary has issued new guidance on the recording of decisions, but as I said to the First Minister two weeks ago, he and the permanent secretary must now mount a wider review of government accountability and transparency to Parliament, because this report is not a report simply about value for money, it's also about trust and confidence, it's about whether the machinery of democracy itself is working in the way that it should, it is about the principles of democracy, it is about the standards of good government, of open government, of transparency and yes of honest government, in the end this is also about respect and regard for public accountability and for parliamentary scrutiny, it is about whether we treat democracy as a right and not a privilege, not just for members of this parliament but for the people we derive and the government derives its power from. That is my deepest conviction, that is what is at stake, the democracy and trust of the people. On behalf of the Public Audit Committee, I move the motion in my name. Thank you Mr Leonard. I would remind all members who would wish to speak in the debate, please ensure that they have in fact pressed the request to speak button. I would also advise members that we do have some time in hand and on that note I call on the cabinet secretary Neil Gray a generous eight minutes please. Thank you very much indeed, Presiding Officer. Firstly I would like to put on record my thanks to the previous transport minister Kevin Stewart, who was due to open this session but has this week resigned for personal health reasons. I am sure, like me, colleagues wish him well and thank him for his service. I would like to reiterate our thanks to the Public Audit Committee for its detailed and in-depth work in preparing this report that builds on the significant work undertaken by the Auditor General in production of his own report into this matter. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the staff of Audit Scotland for their professional and detailed approach to compiling that report and also concur with the convener in terms of thanking the members of the committee and the clerks for the compilation of the report that we are considering today. Can I reiterate at the outset that the Scottish ministers regret for the delay to the ferries? I fully understand the distress and difficulty caused by this and I apologise again to our island communities for the unacceptable delays in the delivery of vessels 801 and 802. As someone who grew up in an island community I know very well the challenges of living in an island community at the outset. Never mind when your connections are disrupted in the way that they have been of late. The Scottish Government has made it a priority to engage directly with communities and hear from them in relation to these impacts and to look for solutions to alleviate the pressures on the ferry network while we await the delivery of those two vessels that we consider today, alongside the four new ships being constructed in Turkey. As we noted in response to the committee, I want to welcome the report's recognition that there has already been significant improvements in procedures and processes by Transport Scotland and CMAL walking alongside CalMac since the procurement of those vessels almost eight years ago. Improvements have already been made in relation to the governance of port and vessel projects and further work is on-going within the tripartite to strengthen this further. Many of those have been adopted prior to either the inquiry into those matters by the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee in 2020 or the Audit Scotland report. This is included consideration of the role and remit of the programme steering board. More recent key strategic recommendations have been channeled through this body and have been broadly welcomed by communities. That is included provision of a resilience vessel at the splitting of the Sky Triangle services and plans to enable 802 to be deployed alongside Glen Sannocks to Arran. Following the REC inquiry, the Scottish ministers confirmed that a review would be undertaken into the existing structures to ensure that they were fit for purpose. We have now published project Neptune and are engaging with communities on possible future arrangements, and we have been clear that the community view is key to this. We are keen that we move at pace to implement the change that communities need and deserve. I have a couple of questions for the cabinet secretary. First of all, when are we going to find out the Government's view on project Neptune and what the future arrangements should be? Secondly, is he going to address any of the recommendations in the report that we are debating? For instance, does he agree that there has been a significant lack of transparency and accountability throughout the project? Start with that one. In terms of project Neptune, that work is on-going, as Graham Simpson well knows. In terms of the other elements of the report, we have responded to it, and I will come to that shortly. We have responded to the report's recommendations and have done what we can to ensure that we are giving as much information as possible, including live information that we can give as far as possible in terms of the on-going situation. When it comes to the future of Ferguson's marines, we are committed to securing a sustainable future for the yard following the completion of 801 and 802. Our decision to take Ferguson's into public ownership saved the last commercial shipyard on the Clyde from closure, rescued more than 300 jobs, and ensured that the two vessels vital for our island communities will be delivered. We have also preserved businesses in the local community on which Ferguson's is relied for their viability. As I have heard over recent days from local parliamentarians Stuart McMillan and Ronnie Cewin, of course. I am very grateful to the Cabinet Secretary for Giving Way. Before he nationalised the shipbuilding yard, was there any work done to look at how much it would cost to maintain the original Ferguson's and the workforce at that time? A lot of the workforce left, and you had to rehire a lot of new people. Obviously, there were challenges that emerged as the work went on. Of course, there was due diligence done in terms of the nationalisation. Of course, circumstances change, as Brian Whittle has suggested. That is something that, of course, we build into our learning from where we have to make these industrial interventions to ensure that we continue to plan to ensure that we can respond as effectively as possible. However, I make no apology for the fact that what we did to nationalise Ferguson's was to save the jobs, save the last commercial shipyard on the Clyde and ensure that the ferries were going to be delivered for our island communities. I will make some progress before I come back to Mr Halcro Johnston. More detail on the work at Ferguson's will be provided in my contribution later. I want to address some of the comments that were made both today and previously by the convener of the committee. At the recent convener's meeting with the First Minister, he suggested that we had cherry-picked the recommendations that were responded to and used very few words. Do not agree with those comments at all and strongly refute that there was any such approach. We carefully reviewed the report and extracted the recommendations that were populated through the chapters. We did, of course, also present our detailed evidence and responses to the issues in the report directly to the committee as part of the evidence sessions. More importantly, we have accepted many of the recommendations put forward to ensure that we continue to strengthen future vessel procurement processes and build on previous work. That includes confirming any use of written authority on the Scottish Government website, welcoming and agreeing with the suggestion of having greater written clarity in shareholder authorisation and written authority and how that should be sought for CMAL, reaffirming our commitment to undertaking our robust lessons learned exercise once the construction of the vessels is complete and emphasising that all parties will engage fully with and support Audit Scotland on any further work to be undertaken. However, there are areas in the report where no conclusion is reached, leaving statements as observations. We did not respond to those directly where there was no recommendation attached, but again, those were addressed throughout evidence sessions. The convener himself just said that there were seven oral evidence sessions, including with the former First Minister. Of course, if there are further areas where the committee would welcome feedback, we will seek to provide that. The Scottish Government is committed to transparency and is proactively published more than 200 documents on its website, and we have co-operated at every stage of the PAC inquiry, as well as those previously undertaken by the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee and Audit Scotland. Throughout its work, the committee had the full participation of a range of senior officials across a number of departments, all of whom had full respect and regard for the parliamentary scrutiny led by the committee. It includes Transport Scotland, who endeavoured to provide all information to the committee in a timely manner. I understand that the committee also received evidence directly from the former First Minister, as I have outlined. I can also confirm, as it has been raised again by the convener, that CMAL, through its lawyers, has commissioned an independent investigation by Barry Smith KC into the allegations raised about the procurement of vessels 801 and 802 in the BBC disclosure programme from last year. Once completed, CMAL will carefully consider its findings and consider what can be shared with Parliament and the committee. Although our view is that there is a need for transparency and openness on this serious matter, I must stress that it is for CMAL in the procuring authority to consider next steps as a result of the investigation. I am sorry, I will need to conclude. I will draw my comments to a close. I will draw my comments to a close again by thanking the committee and Audit Scotland for their work on the report and assuring the chamber that we are progressing the matters that we have committed to and detailed in our response. This Government will continue to focus on the replacement of the ferry fleet and improving service delivery with communities at the heart of that process. Thank you, cabinet secretary. I now call on Craig Hoyd to open on behalf of the Scottish Conservatives. Again, a reasonably generous of a minute. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I would like to start by thanking the clerks and the staff of the Scottish Parliament Public Audit Committee for their support in compiling the detailed report. It documents a shocking series of bad decisions and poor practice, culminating in two ferries, three times over budget and five years late, ferries that have still to set sail, one of which it would now be cheaper to scrap and start all over again. Long-established procurement processes simply not followed, a story story of key decisions not being properly recorded, of ministers failing to account for the decisions that they took, of key documents going missing, of the ministerial code broken, the biggest blank check in the history of the Scottish Parliament being written, standard maritime construction processes dismissed, financial safeguards and standard builders refund guarantees simply disregarded. I will take an intervention. I thank Craig Hoyd for taking the intervention. Just on the point of the blank check, surely the biggest blank check was actually the building of this Parliament? I said this Parliament, you might have realised that the blank check was written in that case before the building of this Parliament, so on that basis there is no point there. This Government wrote the biggest blank check in the history of the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament and the people are now paying the price. This is the story of an SNP Government failing to respond time and time again openly and transparently to legitimate questions. Regrettably, and I say this regrettably, this is also a story of SNP members of the Public Audit Committee blatantly seeking to undermine this report in a cynical bit to get their ministers off the hook. And all the while it is Scotland's island communities who are paying the price. Deputy Presiding Officer, let me turn to Audit Scotland's original report of March 2022. That report made clear that Scottish ministers approved the contract award to Ferguson Marine Engineering Ltd in October 2015. They did so despite knowing the significant risks caused by FML's inability to provide mandatory refund guarantees and also set against the severe misgivings of CMAL. As Scotland's impartial auditor general has said, there is insufficient evidence to explain why Scottish ministers made that decision. The worst part of all of this is that no minister has come to this Parliament to take responsibility for the tragic comedy of errors that has unfolded. Let's look at some of the evidence that we took and some of the key conclusions of the report. Jim McCall told us that the ferries being built at Ferguson's are, quotes, obsolete and will spew out what he described as poisonous gases. Morag McNeill, the interim chair of CMAL, told us that the preferred bidder announcement risked the entire procurement process. She said, and I quote, our preference was for that to be done on a confidential basis and for there not to be a public announcement. The former transport minister, Derek Mackay, admitted that there had been a catastrophic failure at the shipyard. Colleagues will know that this report was not agreed with the unanimous support of the committee, and that is regrettable. In public and perpetually and sometimes perpetually in private, SNP committee members chose to dismiss the evidence that was clear and overwhelming. A close examination of the report reveals that some of the core conclusions that Mr Beattie and Mr Coffey sought to delete or dilute. For example, Richard Leonard proposed that additional wording be added to refer to the poor judgement shown by Derek Mackay and to reflect that the integrity of the procurement process had been compromised. Instead, Mr Hoi put on record a quote that happened in a private session in a committee. I am seeking your guidance on whether that is permissible. I thank Clare Haughey for her point of order. It is not entirely clear to me what the facts are and whether or not Mr Hoi is referring to a private session of the committee, and perhaps Mr Hoi could elucidate the matter. I am referring to the appendix of the report that has the breakdown of the divisions that took place at each point, in which case each motion that was put before the committee is in the final report. I am quoting from the final report. I am afraid that the appendices will have to listen to them, because the appendices are littered with further examples. In relation to Keith Brown's shocking attempt to dodge scrutiny by repeatedly stonewalling legitimate questions from this—yes, a good question—where is the former First Minister? Where is Mr Brown? They are not here. Instead, they have put. Ms Haughey, we do not need to have the sedentary chitchat. Mr Hoi, please. That would apply also to Mr Simpson. Mr Hoi, please continue. Let us look at Mr Brown's shocking attempt to dodge scrutiny. The committee's draft report concluded that the lack of co-operation that we experienced from the former Cabinet Secretary for Investment, Infrastructure and Cities is also a matter of serious concern. Mr Beatty's response is to argue that we should hit the delete key again. Mr Leonard also proposed additional wording to reflect that Seamall's negotiating position was almost certainly weakened by the public announcement of the preferred bidder, as Seamall itself said to us. The conclusion that we reached in draft form is reasonable. I quote, the committee is not convinced that such a public announcement was necessary or indeed appropriate for this project, especially at a time given the considerable work and negotiation that was required before Seamall could take a decision to award the formal contract. We believe that this almost certainly weakened Seamall's negotiating position with FMAIL. Mr Beatty's response again is to try and hit the delete key, but SNP members did not stop there in their attempts to whitewash the report on behalf of the ministers. The report draft stated that it also remains unclear why the First Minister led on the preferred bidder announcement and why the First Minister's press release and associated social media communications did not reflect that there were significant negotiations to be concluded. Again, SNP members disagreed voting in vain to try and remove this passage. They were similarly obstructive when it came to following the money. On the use of the £10 million loan to FMAIL, the report's conclusion was clear. The committee considers that transparency over the use of public money is essential. That example falls, we said, well short of the standards of transparency we would expect. Isn't it strange that a member of the Scottish Parliament's public audit committee and that stage also a treasure of the SNP could take issue with such a conclusion? Perhaps now we know why there was such an absence of financial control that allowed the SNP to sneak a motorhome onto its books without, apparently, the knowledge of its very own treasurer. When it came to the meeting between the First Minister and Jim McCall, a meeting where the recollections of the two protagonists differ significantly, again, there was an SNP attempt to neuter the committee. The report concludes that record and note-keeping of those meetings was weak and fell well short of the standards of transparency and accountability that we would expect. It continues, it is particularly concerning that there does not appear to be a full record of the meeting held between the former director of FML and the First Minister in May 2017, and it concludes that a permanent civil servant should have attended and produced a record of that meeting in line with the established protocols in the Scottish ministerial code. Deputy Presiding Officer, yet again, Willie Coffey and Colin Beattie sought to play down criticism of this Government by seeking to remove elements of this clear account of that evidence session. I don't have time. In the end, thankfully, their attempts to divert, dilute, distract and delete the legitimate criticism of the Government did not succeed and the report stands as a very solid piece of work, and I thank my colleagues for that. However, the SNP did not only seek to attempt to amend the report, it also sought to undermine the report. Upon its publication, a statement was released by Mr Coffey and Mr Beattie through an SNP spokesman. It said that the headlines chased by the committee convener significantly embellished the actual substance of the report, which offers very little in the way of new information. For the record, I disagree with that view entirely, and I support the convener in his conclusion that the people of Scotland have been badly let down by SNP ministers. Deputy Presiding Officer, having reviewed 16 hours of scrutiny and thousands of pages of evidence, only a lame lapdog or a lackey could have come to a different conclusion. The Public Audit Committee's verdict on the SNP's long-running ferries fiasco was fair and proportionate, and our report identifies a series of failures on an unprecedented scale. I now call on Neil Bibby, on behalf of Scottish Labour, a reasonably generous six minutes. Thank you, Presiding Officer, for the opportunity to speak on behalf of Scottish Labour in this debate. I wish my colleague Alex Rowley a speedy recovery from his recent plan of surgery, and I also wish Kevin Stewart well, too. I almost always say when starting my contributions in this place that I welcome the chance to speak in the debate, but I have to say that there is nothing to welcome about one of the biggest public procurement disasters in the history of devolution ferries three times over budget and five years late. I do want to thank, though, the Public Audit Committee, particularly the convener and its officials for their extensive work, that was done in spite of the difficulties that they encountered, as outlined by Mr Hoy. The motion today asks us to note the conclusions and recommendations of the report. I not only do that, but I want to put on record that I agree with those recommendations, even if the SNP members of that committee who try to remove any criticism of Scottish Government ministers from the report do not. I say to them that almost everyone with any sense in Scotland knows that the Scottish Government is ultimately responsible and at serious fault for this fiasco. The attitude and failure of those SNP committee members to fully recognise this reflects very badly on them indeed. This week on South East, like every week in many of our islands, we see the impact of this debacle and people paying the cost of this Government's failure. Of course, we need to look at how ferry services are running in the future, but the number one reason why people in Scotland do not have a reliable ferry service is because we do not have a reliable ferry pleat. Despite what the First Minister claimed earlier in this chamber, over the past 16 years, only six ferries have so far been built during the SNP's time in office, six and 16 years, compared to 10 ferries built by the last Labour Liberal Democrat Government in half that time, 10 in eight years. Because of this fiasco, when we are having the situation where our ferry network is in crisis and we are having to build ferries in Turkey, we are also having to pay £1 million a month for the Cataman MV Alfred as our relief vessel. The Public Audit Committee's report sheds a light on how this situation came to pass and a series of concerns over the SNP's financial mismanagement and irresponsibility. It also highlights the considerable lack of transparency and accountability from all those involved, including Government ministers. From FML not being open about their inability to provide the full builders refund guarantee to our First Minister himself in his position as Transport Minister, exercising poor judgments in the words of the committee and stating that he had no knowledge of the preferred bidder when evidence suggests that he did, the entire scandal has been characterised by the complete opposite of transparency. It is little wonder that there are still so many unanswered questions. In particular, serious questions of competition and serious concerns over the integrity of the procurement process remain, which compromises public trust. The findings of the KC inquiry must be shared with this Parliament, no ifs, no buts and in full. I will say to the cabinet secretary that it is not for CML to tell us what they will and will not share with this Government. That report needs to be shared in full. No ifs, no buts, and I hear the cabinet secretary making comments that I couldn't make them out. I would welcome clarification from the cabinet secretary that the KC findings will be given to Parliament in full with no redactions. No one in Government has taken responsibility for this, with a merry go round of ministers who once couldn't get down to the yard quick enough for a photo op, who are now desperate to void any association with this fiasgo. Real responsibility would be a Government minister staking their position on fixing this mess and seeing out the job until it is done. The Government have also failed to hold senior management accountable too, senior management who should not have received a penny of bonuses for these ferries delayed and over budget. To add insult to injury, the former turnaround director has paid £2 million despite overseeing more delays and increasing costs. People don't just want to hear the Government say, I agree with you that that is wrong, they want ministers to get their money back. Presiding officers, a lot of blame to go round for this fiasgo. Ministers, agencies, management, but the one group of people, as the convener said, who have been entirely blameless throughout this is the Ferguson's workforce. In fact, if the warnings of the Gmb union had been listened to earlier, we perhaps wouldn't be in this mess now. It's vital that we listen to them going forward. Along with Alex Rowley, I met Gmb shop stewards, Alex Logan and John McMunnigaw, at the yard some weeks ago. They are calling for investment of facilities in the yard. They are also calling for the yard to be directly awarded smaller, simpler and standardised vessels to secure a positive future for the yard and for the workforce, work that can easily be done at the yard, as has been demonstrated before. The Ferguson's workforce should not be judged against those two vessels. The Ministry of Defence's work from BAE is a vote of confidence in the yard, and the Scottish Government should follow suit by awarding the contracts from the small ferry vessel replacement programme, but with robust oversight in place. We need a national ferry building programme that gives our islanders the ferries they deserve but bills them efficiently here in Scotland, not in Turkey. Nor should the Government sell off the yard now. This is the Government's mess, therefore it is the Government's job to clear it up and to help to restore the reputation of the yard. In conclusion, the report has highlighted a lack of financial responsibility, a lack of transparency and ultimately accountability, inadequate oversight on the entire situation, start to finish and finally a complete disregard for stakeholder engagement. Despite what SNP members of the committee may think, islanders, workers and every taxpayer in Scotland are paying the price for this SNP Government's incompetence and financial mismanagement. Thank you, Mr Bibby. I now call on Willie Rennie to open on behalf of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and a recent play generous six minutes to Mr Rennie. Deputy Prime Minister, I apologise, but as agreed, I won't be able to remain for the conclusion of this debate today. I need to attend a teachers' event up in Avymor this evening, but I can assure members that I will be listening online throughout my journey to the Highlands, and that is honest. I also want to recognise the contribution of Kevin Stewart to ministerial office, and I do wish him well with his health. His health is more important to be frank than any job. I also want to thank the committee, the clerks and the opening contribution from the convener in his usual passionate style. When the economy secretary announced to the parliament that he was issuing a ministerial direction ordering Ferguson's to complete the two ferries, overriding the value for money test, he just couldn't resist. He sought to make a virtue of that decision. In the wake of a humiliating admission that it would be cheaper to scrap the second boat and start again elsewhere, he thought it was time to claim credit for the decision. Making a virtue, while taxpayers picked up the tab, the shipyard workers were humiliated and the islanders were on the march, the truth is that he had no choice. To choose any other option would lead to further delays and would finish the yard for good, but just because he had no choice does not mean that it was a good decision. There is little in this sorry saga that has been a good decision, and I will take an intervention now. I thank Willie Rennie for giving way, and I am glad that he provided the additional context around the decision that I took, because it was a narrow value for money assessment that I proceeded with written authority over. That did not take account of the impact of the community, nor of the yard, nor of the island communities, should there be further delay. Does he accept that, with the context of that wider consideration, of course this was the right decision to take? Who created that context? It was this Government that made a series of terrible decisions over many years, many of which Richard Leonard outlined in his opening remarks. It has been an expensive episode that mistakes have been so costly that, if we had awarded the contracts elsewhere back at the start and sent every Ferguson worker home with £300,000 in their back pocket, we would still have change left over—a third of £1 million for every worker to sit at home and we would still have two ferries. In fact, we would now have two ferries sailing to the Isles, serving the islanders and also the communities that we seek to represent. The minister thought that it was wise to take credit. He had hardly flinched when he opened a taxpayers' chequebook to sign a blank cheque, spending taxes that have been raised by nurses who battle through the pandemic, by teachers working long hours to keep up with the demands of the job, by workers in a fish factory on a 12-hour shift juggling three jobs just to make ends meet. Perhaps the minister should think of those people the next time he seeks to blidly spend millions of their money. The ownership of this fiasco is not in doubt. Remember, it was the SNP that brought in their favourite businessman to run the yard when he'd never built a ship in his life before. Remember, it was the SNP who awarded the contract to the yard. It was the SNP who interfered in the procurement process, who interfered for party advantage, who interfered with the builders guarantee. Remember, it was the SNP who took over the yard when it collapsed. Yet the minister thought that he should take credit for saving the yard when it was his Government that put it in decision that was potentially under threat. We thought we'd seen the worst, but the fury in the faces of the islanders from South East tells you just how angry they are. Lines of cars parked up for as far as you could see at Loch Boysdale. 600 people rubbed shoulders to make their views known. That is about a third of the population of South East and Erisgy. You'd need 500,000 glass regions in George Square to match that strength of feeling. They are angry about the lost bookings. Businesses are under threat. Income has been lost. Missed hospital appointments. Weddings postponed. Empty shelves on the shops. What's worse is that this Government isn't even providing a penny of compensation. Ministers are content to issue a ministerial direction to spend millions more at Ferguson's, but not a penny for the shopkeepers of South East. They are happy to shell out £1 million a month for the MV Alfred, but not a penny for the B&Bs on Erisgy. They sit idle while Ferguson's pay millions of bonuses to the bosses, but not a penny for the islanders. The money would be better spent by CalMac. CalMac, apparently, is for the greater good. Haven't we come to a pretty pass that those who have suffered the most at the hands of this incompetent Government are lectured by ministers of this Government about the sacrifices that they need to take to for the greater good? For goodness sake, stop the faffing. Give the islanders the compensation. End the insulting boasting about the virtue of this Government's decisions. Do the right thing. Thank you, Mr Rennie, and we will now move to the open debate. I would advise members that, at the present time, there is some time in hand, so that can be factored in. Obviously, if that changes in due course, the chair will advise members, and at that stage any interventions would require to be accommodated within the member's speaking slot. On that note, I call Stuart McMillan to be followed by Brian Whittle. Thank you very much. First of all, Brian Whittle asked the Cabinet Secretary a question earlier regarding the yard. In general, Mr Whittle, the yard was a working museum. It had received very little investment in that building and also in the kit in that building. The workforce was still actually using kit back in the 1940s, trying to build ships. That was when the yard was under private ownership. It was also sometimes nationalised in the 1970s, but the yard had had a complete dearth of investment for decades. If that is the case, why did you award the contract to him from such a bad condition? We need to speak through the chair, Stuart McMillan. As the cabinet secretary indicated earlier on, due diligence had taken place. We need to hear Mr McMillan's contribution. With the investment that is going to go into the yard to try to update the yard, as it clearly has, and anybody who has actually been in the yard—I do not know if Mr Whittle has or hasn't—anyone who has actually been in the yard will see a lot of the investments that I have actually went in the third yard since 2014. I was not going to touch on this, but I was on project Neptune. I have grave concerns about project Neptune, and I have already written to the Scottish Government about it. A number of us in the committee in this chamber have already attended some of the events that were hosted by the then transport minister, Jenny Goh Ruth. As a consequence of that, I write to the Scottish Government because I genuinely feel that project Neptune will potentially be a waste of the opportunity. On Willie Rennie's point, I was shocked that Willie Rennie's comments regarding the yard clearly—Mr Rennie—he would not have actually stepped in to save the yard. The yard would have been shut. Just one more second, Mr Rennie. The yard would have been closed, and he is talking about £300,000 per employee. That would have been potentially just for the first two ships, so what would have happened since? At no stage did I say that I wanted to close the yard. What I did say was that I wanted this Government to do things properly. If it had done things properly, we would not be in this situation today and we would have two ferries that the Government failed. Does he not accept that? What Mr Rennie said was that he would have awarded the orders to elsewhere. That is what he said, Mr Rennie, so that is what Mr Rennie said. As a consequence, the yard would have closed. There would have been no yard, no workforce at that place. One of the things for me about this whole situation is that I want to put in record my appreciation for the workforce of Ferguson Marine. This workforce, whether intentional or not, has been dragged through the mire and the whole story has been completely unfair on every single member of that workforce. This is where sections 226 to 231 of the committee report are extremely helpful. The workforce at the yard have the skills, the ability and the experience, and they want the best for the yard. That is a sustainable and prosperous future. I gently highlight to the chamber that the continual hammering of the yard does nothing to improve the morale of the workforce, nor their hopes and aspirations for its future. I have already taken a few, Mr Simpson. The narrative needs to change so that the yard can develop the future that we all claim to want. I am keen to ask the convener of the committee a question. He used the word rigged on the BBC GMS programme on the day of the publication of the report yet that word does not appear in the committee report. In the sections 84.85 of the report cover this with section 85 stating, and I quote, while this is a serious allegation, the committee does not, in this report, draw conclusions from the BBC programme. Surely the convener would accept that using that type of language that, even when paraphrasing somebody else, only plays into the hands of those who want the yard to fail? No, Mr McMillan. I have been fighting for that yard and for those workers and for those jobs for decades, so I will not take lessons from you about who is on the side of the yard or not. If the word rigged was used, it would be a quotation because that is the expression that was used by the team that produced the BBC disclosure programme. They said that it was a rigged process. The committee's position is not that we endorse that, but I would be merely reflecting that in an interview with the BBC. That is certainly not how it looks to the transcript, convener. I feel the support and actions that the Scottish Government has taken, in helping to save the yard in 2014 and 2019, and the awarding of the two vessels fairly secured the yard's future. I make no mistake, we have heard in this chamber and outside in recent months that if the orders went elsewhere, the Scottish Government would have been quite rightly criticised and I would have been leading the campaign for the orders to actually go to the yard. Neil Bibby has already touched upon the issue of what is going to Turkey. If it did not have the yard, then the orders would have went to Turkey as well. We would not be having this debate today or many of the others that have already taken place in this Parliament if the order went elsewhere. Instead, the residents of the new apartments that would surely have been built on the site of the former shipyard would be enjoying the views over the Clyde living beside Newark Castle. As far as the workforce, the Port Glasgow community and myself are concerned, Ferguson Marine must remain a shipyard for many decades to come. To pine the sky ideas about shutting the yard and moving it to Inch, Green, Dry, Dock as a non-starter, in addition to those wishing to buy an apartment in the Clyde with a view over the Clyde, there are plenty of places to go to to see that. Shipbuilding in Port Glasgow must remain. I welcome the fact that much of the committee, this committee report, helps to read or understand more about the situation that has happened. I know however that it is not clearly a unanimous report, as members have already touched upon. I also want to touch upon a factual inaccuracy, which centres around my letter to the Scottish Government and the subsequent reply. I became the MSP for a good number of Clyde in 2016, not before. I am sure that Duncan MacNeill would not be too happy about being airbrushed out of his earned position at the time at sections 86 to 93, but also preceding at subsequent sections contained that factual inaccuracy. I am looking specifically at section 89 and the reply from the Scottish Government. I am sure that a similar section and a division would have appeared if the then cabinet secretary or minister had either not replied or replied, providing no information. In section 88 of the committee report states, and I quote the constituents MSP for a good number of Clyde, was undertaking his duties as an elected representative by approaching the then cabinet secretary for finance, constitution and economy to ask what alternatives to a BRG existed in a bid to support the ship-burning industry in the area that it represents. I stand by my decision to write to the then finance secretary. I was content that the minister at the time provided information that I clearly shared with FML and the committee. What decisions are taken thereafter was a matter for FML. I think that the oral evidence document documented in section 156 of the report is also important to highlight. I am being generous, Ms McMillan, but I think that we need to start to communicate. Okay. I will just finish this point if I may then, Presiding Officer. I think that the quote from the then chief executive of Transport Scotland that was interesting, and I quote, is that we still had the outcome of the procurement which told us that it was the best bid for price and quality and we had secured some negotiations of risk from CML to Ferguson's and from us with CML. Presiding Officer, I will not apologise for our Government stepping in to save the yard, saving the jobs and getting those ferries finished, because that certainly is going to provide a future for many, many people in my community in the decades to come. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms McMillan, and I now call Brian Whittle to be followed by Willie Coffey. Mr Whittle. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I do welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate. I thank the Public Orch Committee and their clerks for their work in delivering this report. I am bringing this debate to the chamber and I have to say that it is almost uncomfortable watching SNP members trying to defend the indefensible in this debate, because we are debating a ferry scandal going back many years, resulting in an eye-watering overspend that is three times the initial budget. Still no ferries, and the island community is now cut off from supplies and livelihoods. £338 million for two ferries. From start to finish, this has been an unmitigated disaster from the MSP. SNP started with the dodgy procurement process mired in allegations of being rigged that announced Ferguson's as the preferred bidder, without the mandatory building fund guarantee, as highlighted by the Auditor General of Scotland, Transport Scotland and CMAL, a shipbuilding company at odds with CMAL and the Government, leading to it going into administration, a staged launch with painted-on windows missing meeting records, a First Minister who somehow couldn't recall vital information and meetings when giving evidence to the committee. Over 50 times she couldn't recall, let's not forget. Finally, if that wasn't enough, we now discover that Hull 802 will not be valued for money, and it would be cheaper to re-procure a brand-new ferry, yet the Scottish Government keeps on digging. That is on top of designing a ferry that won't fit into the port from which it was procured to sail from. You could not make that up, Deputy Presiding Officer. A credible, sensible Government faced with these problems would apply the rule when, in a Hull, stopped digging. However, the Scottish Government continued to dig the hole, employed highly-paid consultants to explain why they are right to keep digging the hole, and then, if it doesn't work, just keep digging faster. The final play, I have no doubt, will be a Cabinet Secretary to explain—it pains to explain—where this mess is somehow somewhere else. However, the reality is that the Scottish Government has now dug a hole so deep for themselves and for the island communities that our next transport minister is more likely to be found on Bondi beach than Barra. The Scottish Government's track record in rescuing failed businesses is that of one flop after another. It may well make these investments with the best of intentions, but time and again the end in failure and what's worse, they don't seem to learn from the mistakes. The biggest issue for me here is the apparent total lack of commercial knowledge being shown. Even if we accept, quite reasonably, that the Scottish Government stepping in to take over a business like FML is not necessarily about making a profit for the Scottish Government, there is a worrying impression here that there is no limit to how much money it will pour in. There is a time and a place for the Scottish Government to step in and prevent a bill. I thank Brian Whittle for taking the intervention. With his comments, I have listened very intently, too. Is Brian Whittle suggesting that hull 802 should be scrapped? As a consequence, if that were to happen, that would certainly have an adverse effect upon the workforce and the future of the shipyard. I thank Stuart McMillan for the intervention. The Scottish Government has got it into a position here where the only decision that it could make was to complete the hull of 802, as Willie Rennie has said, but it is its mistakes that are costing the Scottish population and the taxpayers money upon money. It is ridiculous, but there is a time and a place for the Scottish Government to step in and prevent a business failure. In those cases, there should be a clear due diligence to understand the scale of the financial commitment, a clear commercial plan of what is needed to turn the business around and, crucially, a properly defined set of criteria for exit. We have seen that at Presswick Airport, however, there is a lack of a clear exit path leaving what should be a commercially viable business sitting on a Scottish Government balance sheet, with offers from the private sector to buy the airport rejected. Assuming that there is even acknowledgement given that we have discovered last week when questioning and committed by my colleague Graham Simpson, the cabinet secretary did not even know that there had been a note of interest to the purchase of Presswick. The most crippling problem facing all those businesses is the same. The sheer ignorance of how business works within the SNP's leadership is compounded now by the detachment from the economic reality that the Scottish Greens have brought into government. Committing to save the yard, the Scottish Government set out three objectives. Complete the vessels 801 and 802, safeguard jobs and give the shipyard a future. I see that there are failing, and at least two of those, and as I said before, many of the original workers were lost and the new company had to hire many new staff. Given the colossal cost overruns and delays that have come for it, it is hard to believe that there was not a better way to achieve the same goal. What would have been the overall cost had the Scottish Government decided to support the original Ferguson's, which said that it was at least being run by business people rather than nationalise a company when the cost had soared to an unacceptable £130 million? Now we sit at £338 million, with four new ferries having been procured without the Scottish Government's own shipyard, even on the tender list. That is why the SNP-Green coalition Government should never be allowed anywhere near business decisions. The Scottish Government's inability to recognise their catalogue of mistakes and their commercial ineptitude leaves island communities cut off to the real nation of their way of life. Platitudes from the First Minister with wooly promises of a resolution by 2027 leaves us wondering how many islanders will be left to welcome the ferry when and if it indeed finally arrives. I now call Willie Coffey to be followed by Paul Swinney. I think that you will find that the SNP members in the committee agreed with substantial critical elements in the report. The offensive comments by Mr Hoy and Bibby are pretty disgraceful, but sadly not unexpected these days from these two parties. Mr Hoy could have said what he said about me and my colleague Colin Beattie at any time at all, but he said not a word. Todd Ray and Cawardly, Mr Hoy. He also has a brass neck, Presiding Officer. In any case, since he has decided to conduct his own inquiry, halfway through our committee's work, while still pretending to remain objective. A minor comment to Mr Whittle about the famous paint of the windows, they were done at the request of the workers. Nobody else, the workers wanted the ship to look as best it could for that particular occasion. So to level that at the Government is just ridiculous. I will listen to you without any comment, Mr Hoy. You do me the same courtesy for once, just for once. Show some courtesy and respect. Mr Coffey, we need to not refer to you because that is me and I do not think that you are referring to me. Through the chamber, Mr Coffey. My abiding memory of the evidence sessions that we had on this issue was the conflicting nature of most of it and the difficulty that we all had in deciding who and what to believe. Inevitably, the risk is that you end up citing—no, thank you. Did you hear me say no, thank you. Mr Simpson, I think that Mr Coffey has made it quite clear that he is not taking the intervention. Mr Coffey? Inevitably, the risk is that you end up citing and emphasising the evidence that suits the political narrative that developed around the project. That is a loss, in my view, to the overall purpose of audit and the obligation that we have to the public to try to get to the bottom of things. The workers' reps at Ferguson's agreed when we met them last October that the Scottish Government's decision to award the contract saved the yard, saved hundreds of jobs and saved shipbuilding in the Clyde. Most of us will agree with that. Curiously, that did not manage to feature in the committee's report of our meeting, but it is worth putting that on record because it was Mr Hoy who asked him the question. If you want to try to get close to the reasons behind the delays to the ferries and the cost overrun, then we should ask the people who know the most, the workers and the current management team charged with delivering the ferries to completion. In their testimony to the committee, you will see those answers fairly clearly. When we spoke to the workers' reps, they were clear that the problems occurred at the outset with the original management team's decisions and lack of consultation with the skilled workforce, who have many years of experience in successfully building ships in the Clyde. They said that, due to the size of the contract for the two vessels, the yard would never be able to accommodate the two ferries at the same time. With the significant changes that are required to reconfigure the yard, it was going to be impossible to meet those original timescales. That was confirmed again last week at the committee by the chief executive, David Tideman, who said that the mistakes made by the original FML in 2015 and the FMPG in 2019 in relation to design management, build sequencing and contracting strategies effectively embedded unrecoverable delays into the programme. The big questions for all the partner agencies is why no-one has spotted this at the outset and intervened to try and correct it. I am on record, my colleagues are on record asking that question of the Government and its agencies. One or two worrying aspects that stood out for me was the build sequencing, some of which seemed to be done purely to trigger payments rather than making sense in the construction process. Our predecessor rural economy committee noted this in their report in the previous session. There were also various milestones along the way that were not tied to quality delivery. In my role as a member of the committee and with some experience to draw on over many years in management systems and quality processes, it seems obvious to me that an essential part of any tendering process is that you conduct a full capability assessment on anyone wanting to deliver work for you. It is surely not enough to accept a tender without fully examining the capability of the contract bidder to deliver the order to the quality required and within the timescales and budget agreed. The committee recorded this important finding in our report. Presiding Officer, if you do not get the project specification correct at the start, then it is unlikely that you will deliver anything in time and on budget at the end, a maximum in any construction process, whether it is ships, bridges, schools or anything else you intend to build. That is one lesson that our committee has pointed to for many years. The audit committee focuses principally on following the public pound and on holding not only the Government but its agencies and delivery partners to account for how that money is spent. At the end of our inquiry, despite our best efforts collectively, even we as a committee could not reach a conclusion about how substantial parts of the £128 million that was referred to by the convener had been spent, and I pay tribute to my friend and colleague Colin Beattie for his forensic scrutiny of that on behalf of the committee. I know that the Auditor General is still considering that issue, and our committee will await his decision and whether he can continue to pursue his follow-up. Presiding Officer, in summary, this has been an extremely difficult inquiry for all the members of the committee. We do not have direct expertise in shipbuilding and rely on those that we invite in front of us to offer accurate testimony to help us in our scrutiny process. Inevitably, as I said earlier, political dimension dominated the majority of the narrative around it and still does much to the anger of the workers. It is making it difficult to reach a consensus that would, in my view, have given us a stronger report for Parliament. All the parties involved have lessons to learn, particularly to ensure that projects are rigorously defined at the outset. That is the key to success, in my view. I remain hopeful that the current management team, led by the excellent Mr Teidman and the magnificent workers at Ferguson's, are allowed to get on with the job of completing those vessels for us and the public that they are intended to serve. I commend the committee for its report and its recommendations. It is painful to read it. It is painful for me not just as a parliamentarian but also as someone with a deep personal connection to Scotland's shipbuilding industry. My family has worked on the Clyde for generations, and it was a great moment of pride for me when I joined BE Systems to continue that tradition in 2011. I was working at BE Systems in Govan in 2014 when Ferguson Marine went into administration—the previous shipbuilding company, Ferguson Shipbuilders Limited went into administration and was rescued by the Scottish Government. I think that we all celebrated that moment. We all thought that that was a good move because we all believed in the future of Scotland's shipbuilding. However, there is one thing to have sentiment and it is another thing to have competence, and that is the thing that has been solely lacking in the last decade of the policies around the shipyard. I think that that has been clearly spelled out in the report. One of my jobs when I worked at BE Systems was to do benchmarking around different shipyards in the world. That involved working with an organisation called First Marine International, which I have a close connection with. I know that they have been heavily involved in Ferguson Marine and trying to understand how to make it an effective shipbuilding operation. The recommendations from First Marine International were used by BE Systems and the Clyde to design what was known commonly as a frigate factory. However, what was intended to be a complete undercover shipbuilding system using a semitandum production methodology. It is very complex to achieve, but we focused our efforts on trying to deliver it because we knew that that was the basis on which world-class shipbuilding is undertaking anywhere else in the world. We needed to be upper quartile in the league table that is developed by First Marine International. We are all around the world in maintaining that benchmarking study. We have developed that design. It certainly had a few false starts, but I am now pleased to see that, in Govan, planning consent has been granted and that the construction of a new integrated shipbuilding facility is under way, underpinned by a permanent and continuous shipbuilding programme that is financed through the Ministry of Defence for eight tight 26 frigates. I guess that that is a contrast to what has happened at Ferguson Marine. We can use that as a useful basis for now what we need to do. One thing looking at the report is one thing tearing lumps off of each other, but we have to raise our sights to what it is that we want to do as a country. Do we want to have commercial shipbuilding in this country or not? That is the question that we need to answer robustly. Do we want to have a national shipbuilding system? That is the question that we need to come to a conclusion about. If we want to do that, it is not good enough to simply say that we want it. We need to put in place the building blocks for it. First and foremost, we need a shipyard that is capable of undertaking the work. The member spoke previously and mentioned that to build a fit-for-purpose shipbuilding facility is either pie in the sky or essential because certainly 801 and 802 are not capable of being built in the current shipbuilding facility. I have been to Ferguson on several occasions. It is not a shipyard that is fit for purpose, but it is fundamentally too small. The workforce is fantastic. It is highly skilled indeed. Many of them are working between different shipyards and different programmes. They move around. It is a very small world shipbuilding in Scotland, as you can imagine. It is nothing to do with the workforce and its skills, but we did not put in place the fundamentals, first of all, charged into a mighty Trojan horse of a project that has gone spectacularly wrong. We are trying to recover our position. The question is whether we put in place the necessary finance capital to build a world-class shipbuilding facility, as I am sure First and the International have presented on numerous occasions and what is needed to be done to do that. Do we put in place the essential financing? It has often been a point of criticism that Ferguson Marine did not have in place a builders refund guarantee, which is the financial cornerstone for any shipbuilding project in the commercial world. The reality is that no British bank provides builders refund guarantees. It is not a financial product offered in Britain. RBS used to do it all the time. In fact, RBS was one of the world's biggest ship financing institutions, but after the 2008 crash it was roofed from it completely. I asked the minister only a matter of weeks ago whether the Scottish National Investment Bank put in place a facility for builders refund guarantees so that Scottish shipyards could undertake commercial work. He said that they are not minded to do so at this point. If we are intending to be a commercial shipbuilding nation, if we do not have the fundamental cornerstone of financing in place then we cannot do it. That is part of the reason why that has never worked. Facilities are not adequate. Financing is not in place, and a patient forward programme is not in place because the current procurement system is not set up to allow Scottish businesses to win. It is not allowing Scottish builders to win. That is why we have the perverse spectacle of over £200 million of public money flowing into the Scottish economy to build ferries there. When we know from economic studies that for every pound spent on a shipbuilding programme in this country it returns £1.30 in value, so we are cutting our own throats here. If we are a Parliament that is set up to try and build and grow the Scottish economy and try and build prosperity for our communities, then that is a singular failure that we should be trying to learn from and we should be understanding what the solutions are. The facilities need to be put in place in a way that is competitive, the financing needs to be put in place in a way that is competitive and the procurement needs to be structured in such a way that allows for series build, allows for those efficiencies to be gained. Between the first of the type 45 destroys, which we worked on at B and the sixth, we saved something of the order of 30 per cent in manners. That shows you what you can achieve with a continued shipbuild programme. That is what needs to be put in place for us to succeed, and that is why it is so essential that the Government finds a means and a way to get the small vessel replacement programme structured in such a way that it can be delivered by Ferguson Marine on an equivalent national shipbuilding champion in the commercial world so that it can be basically a conveyor belt of production so that the workers can achieve the learning curves and it can be underpinned by the financing and the facilities that are fit for purpose. That is it. If we can get those things in place, then we can be a successful commercial shipbuilding country again. So, whilst we can ruminate and chastise everyone about the failures that have happened over the last decade, the solutions are staring us in the face that we've achieved it with naval shipbuilding, we can achieve it in commercial ship when I urge the minister and all colleagues here to collaborate constructively to achieve that for us all. It is as well to start off as we have all done in several previous ferries debates with the frank acknowledgement of the situation faced. Many of us were in this chamber in October 2015 to hear the contract award announcement for vessels 801 and 802. I doubt whether any of us in even our uneasiest dreams could have imagined that we might be here nearly eight years later discussing the circumstances of those two vessels' on-going construction, if I can begin a sentence or two first. The Public Audit Committee's report, which we are debating today, adds to the work done by the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee's inquiry in session 5 and the Auditor General for Scotland's report in March of last year. As the Audit Scotland report notes, procuring both vessels at the same time was intended to be the start of a standardised approach to building new vessels for CalMac. The contract was for a combined £97 million for both ships with delivery due in May and July of 2018. Those were, of course, intended to be the first of a series of vessels that would have seen the average age of sea miles major vessels reduced from 21 years in 2017 to 12 years by 2025. Instead, as is very well but very fairly rehearsed, island communities have, of course, been left waiting for new vessels during that period. As a result of the sequence of events that we have gone through today, many island communities are still depending on vessels such as MV Isle of Arran for network resilience. That, for those of you who do not know her, is a vessel that is so old that it predates the emergence of Apple PCs and commercial camcorders. I spend a great proportion of my life raising concerns about the ferry network, which is a measure of just how essential ferries are for every aspect of island life. That reliance on an ageing and overstretched fleet is, of course, having real and serious consequences for my constituents. CalMac crews and shore staff do an outstanding job, but CalMac itself, as a company, can and should be doing much better for island communities. This winter's annual refit programme has been one of the most chaotic in living memory and it has shown itself to be maddeningly inflexible to changing circumstances. The latest decision to deprive south-east of its ferry service entirely again for all of June is one example of why island voices are increasingly, as we have all seen, being raised to use phrases like out-of-touch and remote when describing CalMac's upper management. I do not mention all of that, the operation of ferry services, to deflect from the undeniable reality that CalMac does not have enough ships to fulfil its duties as an operator or even at present to sail from all the ferry ports advertised on its timetable. I welcome, however, the news that Glen Sannocks, however, elatedly now shows signs of being ready for this autumn and that progress with vessel 802 suggests that she might be in service late next year, just as I do also warmly welcome the award of contracts to build a further four new vessels, construction of two of which is now well underway. The cabinet secretary for wellbeing, economy, fair work and energy's decision to give him a ministerial direction for vessel 802 to be completed at Ferguson's was, despite much bluster in this chamber today and previously from some quarters, the right thing to do. It may very well have cost less to start again and build elsewhere, however the costs of waiting the necessary two or probably three years extra to do so would have been borne by island communities and businesses as they continued to deal with disruption. The Public Audit Committee agreed with the REC committee that the decision-making structure for the procurement and construction of new vessels to serve the Clyde and Hebrides ferries network is cluttered and lacks transparency. The landscape of differing responsibilities of Scottish ministers, civil servants, seamal, calmac and transport Scotland is, in my view, and that of many others, very complex indeed. I hope that the work under way to review governance arrangements through project Neptune provides an opportunity to set some of this right. Angus Campbell from the ferry users community board has been diligently going around the country to ensure community input into any future reform. In conclusion, I want first on a personal note to thank the outgoing transport minister for the very considerable efforts that he made in office to engage with many island communities, including my own, and wish him all the best for an improvement in his health. I also want to conclude by saying that everyone in the islands is painfully aware, believe you me, of the failings associated with the buildings of the Glens Anarchs and Vessel 802. There are failings for which there have been undoubted consequences both economically and socially for my constituents, but they also raise wider questions too about how we make sure that, in the future, the management of ferry service by CalMac itself is done more effectively. Not least, if I can be entirely frank about this and others have mentioned this, I hope that CalMac will take the hint that there is something far wrong with the matrix that it uses to decide which ferry services to abandon at any given time given that it is generally the same ferry service that is abandoned. All of those are questions that Government and CalMac alike will need to address in order to ensure that we do have the ferry services that we need for the years ahead. On that note, I will conclude. One of the most striking comments ever made by a witness to a parliamentary committee inquiry was in late 2020 when the witness was posed the question why the outcome of a hugely valuable public procurement exercise, which named its price up front, would produce a winning bid which was deemed to be both highest in quality and highest in price. The witness in response said the following, I do not know the answer, but three things spring to mind. One is incompetence, another is vested interest and the final one is corruption. You could construe that as an abstract or even unfair critique of the Government, but is there perhaps any truth to it, because I think that it sums up this entire fiasco in three damning accusations. All 129 pages of the aptly-named construction and procurement of ferries in Scotland report, penned by the last Parliament's rural economy committee, made for damning reading, and I declare an interest because I co-offered it. There was an equally critical transport committee report as far back as 2008, when one Mr Patrick Harvie MSP himself oversaw the production of that report back in the days when the Greens had some backbone. They see they couldn't even be bothered turning up today, signing off, sir. Of course, there have been many more indictments of this situation since last year's Audit Scotland report, and this latest 125-page instalment by this Parliament's public audit committee, a granular, forensic piece of work. All reports that have gathered dust on the shelves of numerous respective transport ministers' shelves, because the key protagonists of this whole sorry saga lie in three camps. The first, where those who were thrown under the proverbial bus were not here to defend themselves today, and by that I reference Paul Wheelhouse and Derek Mackay. The second, whose transport failures in office were instead rewarded by the heady heights of high office, and anyone who listened to today's FMQs best illustrated that. Those who I respect are the real authors of this entire mess, or those who sat at the very top of Government, those who signed the checks, those who announced a deal at party conference before the deal had even been signed, those who ironically smashed a bottle of iron whisky against the hull of 801 some six years ago, and those who occupy the Government's back benches when they're not popping up on daytime chat shows. I note not one of them had the guts or the shame to turn up to this Parliament today to defend themselves or their actions. Three devastating charges, Presiding Officer, three. The first was incompetence, the incompetence of numerous ministers who could not sit, see mal, FML or Transport Scotland around the table to either negotiate or oversee or manage disputes amongst the three of them. In a second, the incompetence, the incompetence of making payments from milestones which had either artificially been reached or had not even been met at all, the incompetence of so-called loans which would knowingly, clearly would never be paid back, or were even being used for purposes other than that for which they were intended, the incompetence of insisting on engine technology which was the source of so much cost and so much delay, and over which there is still so much doubt over its use or efficacy. I'm happy to give away to the member. Russell Findlay. Thank you for giving away. Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney hijacked the yard and its workers for politics and PR. I'd like to ask the member if he knows when's the last time either of them showed face at Ferguson's. Jamie Greene. I suspect they haven't got the guts to show face at Mr Findlay because they know exactly that their actions and their agencies actions have paved the way for the disaster that we see ourselves in now. That's why I came on to my second charge named in that evidence session and that was of vested interest because this is a relevant point. We do not know what Alex Salmond promised Jim McCall back in the heady day of 2014. We do not know what Nicola Sturgeon promised Jim McCall in 2015 or 2016 or even 2017 as a report alludes to because there are no minutes of those meetings. The Scottish Government and its agencies, which don't forget the Scottish Government being the biggest creditor to the yard, saw its spiral into administration under its own watch, Presiding Officer. The vested interest that hid from scrutiny behind the cloak of commercial confidentiality every step of the way ministers were given 29 options to resolve the yard's financial problems, all presented to them independently by Price Waterhouse Coopers. They instead forced their way into the boardroom of the yard and took control. What about the vested interests of the turnaround directors? The only thing that turned around in this was their personal fortunes. We will never know where that huge pipeline of commercial perspective work went. Where are all the RFIs? Where are all the tender responses that were piled up in Ferguson's boardroom white board? We never found out what the effect that state ownership would have on the yard's ability to compete for commercial work. We never got a response to the CMA's warnings about directly awarding contracts. We never found out why Jim McCall's offer to buy the yard back, even one just a couple of weeks ago, when unnoticed and unresponsive. We never even know who else bid for the yard before the Government nationalised it. All the while, and members are right to point this out, the good workers and grafters of that yard, under direction where welding pieces of ship completely out of kilter from what they knew to be right, under direction just so that the First Minister could turn up for a photo shoot. It is that third and final most grievous charge that I must raise the chamber's awareness to, and that is that of corruption. Only in Scotland could you get away with a decade-long scandal like this, and not one single person has lost their job. Not one single person has paid the price for the sorry saga. Will I lie? Taxpayers have paid the price, and our island communities, islanders on Arran, who have to wait and turn up and see if their ferry is running and if they are lucky enough to get on it. Let's not forget that the whole Northern Irish Government fell and collapsed after our renewable heat scandal, which cost their taxpayers a couple of £100 million. I suspect that that would barely make a topical question. All the while here in Inver, we have ministers. Ministers would get around Scotland for any problems. What do they do? They just charter them to get around instead. That is the reality check of what is happening in this current Government versus what is happening in our island communities. I hear them moaning because they do not like the truth. The latest report, and a damning one at that, is the last of such many. It lays bare the simple truth, the simple truth on all three counts of incompetence, of vested interest and of corruption that this Government is undoubtedly guilty as charged. Before I start my contribution, I tried to intervene earlier on Craig Hoy to ask if he thought it was respectful or fair to constantly refer to a member who is not in the chamber because he is ill and has no recourse to reply. I thought that was shameful. I am speaking today not to rake over the calls of what has happened on the hugely important issue of ferries. The committee convener and members have addressed many aspects of the challenges leading up to where we are now, and rightly so. Ministers have apologised for the delay to the ferries and the distress and difficulties caused, but I repeat what the cabinet secretary said in his opening speech. The Scottish Government will never apologise for taking action to save more than 300 jobs at Ferguson's shipyard. Today's debate is about how we move forward by standing by our commitment to the shipbuilding communities in Inverclyde and our island communities that rely on the vessels currently being built at Ferguson's. The completion of vessels 801 and 802 will provide a high-quality lifeline service to our island communities, who I know are having a desperate time right now. Speaking as someone who represents an urban mainland constituency, I honestly cannot imagine what islanders are going through, and I hope that the situation is urgently remedied for very obvious reasons. No, I am not taking interventions. No, thank you. There is no doubt that our island communities deserve to be supported by two new energy-efficient vessels with the capacity and reliability required to support vibrant island economies. I ask that members refrain from making remarks from a sedentary position. While the pure value for money assessment on vessel 802 is challenging, no doubt about that, the Government had to take a very finely balanced decision. We must take into account the added delays, the wider benefits of continuing the vessels built at Ferguson Marine or the full cost of not doing so. A new vessel could not be deployed until at least May 2027 at the earliest, four years from now and two and a half years from the current delivery timescale. It just would not be acceptable to ask our island communities to wait this further period. We all know that they have waited long enough. Vessel 802 will provide lifeline connectivity to the mainland and ensure that the people on the view—I am not taking interventions—a new vessel could not be deployed until at least May 2027. Vessel 802 will provide lifeline connectivity to the mainland and ensure that people on the beautiful island of Arran are supported for day-to-day needs around health, education and commercial activity and provide a resilient service to support the tourist industry, which contributes so much to the island's economy. Recent issues with the reliability of an ageing island fleet and the costs associated with hiring replacement vessels in order to maintain services have merely added to the compelling case for delivering additional capacity as quickly as possible. That is why the Scottish Government has issued a written authority to continue to complete delivery of both vessels at Ferguson Marine. The project costs to complete them are currently estimated to be £202.6 million, including contingency. The publication of the Public Audit Committee's report, New Vessels for the Clyde and Hebrides Arrangements to Delivery, hulls 801 and 802, was welcome, and I congratulate them on a thorough and balanced report. It recognised that there have already been significant improvements in procedures and processes by Transport Scotland and Caledonia maritime assets limited since the procurement of those vessels almost eight years ago. Both organisations, along with CalMac Ferries Ltd, are committed to continuing to build on those improvements and, in particular, how communities and stakeholders are embedded in the process, and that value for money for taxpayers underpins investment decisions. The Scottish Government supports the growth of commercial shipbuilding in Scotland, and why wouldn't we with our proud shipbuilding heritage? The Scottish Government is in active engagement with Audit Scotland in strengthening the business investment framework within the Scottish Public Finance Manual. I will agree an action plan with them to increase transparency and further enhance this framework to ensure a consistent approach to future investment while ensuring ministers have appropriate flexibility to intervene to support industries and communities. Of course, any decision on further audit work is for the Auditor General of Scotland, but all parties will fully engage in any work identified. In response to some of the remarks made today, the Scottish Government is committed to transparency and has proactively published more than 200 documents on its website. In conclusion, Scottish ministers have taken action to ensure the completion of two ferries by Ferguson Marine following a due diligence assessment carried out on forecast costs. I believe that this is entirely the right decision. Cabinet Secretary Neil Gray has clearly outlined the Scottish Government's commitment to supporting the completion of the vessels, which remain the quickest way of introducing new lifeline connectivity for island communities. I look forward to the delivery of those two vital vessels as soon as possible, and I thank the skilled workers who are working so hard to make this happen. We move to winding up speeches. We are grateful to the Public Audit Committee and its staff for their work on this report. Presiding Officer, the workforce at Ferguson's has been let down by this Government. Stuart McMillan seemed to suggest that people in this chamber were hammering the workers at the yard, but they are not. They are hammering his government, and if he tries diverting that anger, it is him that is causing distress to the workers at the yard. The workforce at CalMac has been let down as well, but those who have been most let down are the communities that are being driven to their knees by the lack of ferries. Neil Bibby and others talked about the unprecedented protests in the south-west. A turnout of a third of the population is unheard of anywhere, and yet that is what happened in the south-west at the weekend. They have had enough, and that has to be fixed. They need ferries, and it will not be fixed without a transport minister. Why is the delay in appointing one? Can the First Minister really not find a willing candidate on the back benches? Richard Leonard talked about the committee report and the lack of transparency, the evasion, how they avoided questions, how they even refused to attend. They did not even have the courtesy to respond in time and in detail to this committee report. If this is how the Scottish Government treats the Public Audit Committee of this Parliament, I begin to wonder, but it is exactly the way that they also treated Audit Scotland. We need transparency. This is the squandering of public money and the betrayal of communities. Neil Bibby and Craig Hoy added their voices in condemnation of Willie Coffey and Colin Beattie, who tried to water down the report. Their role on the Audit Committee is to represent the people of Scotland, not the SNP. For the minister to tell us today that SEMA will decide on which parts of the KC report will be published, it is absolutely shocking. This is a failing Government trying to hide the truth. The Scottish Government is squandering taxpayers' money. The cost of the Glen Sanox in Hull 802 would have been almost enough to renew the whole fleet. Bizarrely, it is also paying penman ferries—an amount for a nine-month hire—that would have pretty much bought the boat. Brian Whittle talked about paying for consultants. Yes, they have paid for consultants on project Neptune. Now they are going out to another procurement for millions of pounds for more consultants—wasted money—when a bystander could tell them for free what we need is ships. It is the only way to solve the problem. They need to sign off a design that will fit harbours, put a running programme of replacement out to tender and build an interchangeable fleet with capacity to cover dry dock and high season. Doing that will invest in shipbuilding, a point made by Paul Sweeney in the debate. At this moment, it does not really matter who runs the contract. You cannot provide a service without boats. Although the Scottish Government loves to point fingers at CalMac, it is simply passing the buck for its own incompetence. Alasdor Allan and the Scottish Government talked about the matrix and put blame on that. However, if you change the matrix, you simply cut off another community, pitting communities against each other. We are already pitting tourists against locals, freight against passengers. Divide and roll simply will not work. I hope that she is not entirely surprised that I am standing up for a community in my constituency who finds themselves on the receiving end of the matrix. Rhoda Grant. I am trying very hard to stand up for every community in my constituency, because they all need ferries, and none of them deserve to be cut off because of incompetence. This is not just a waste of public money—a squandering of public money on ferries that may never sail. The economic damage to our communities is immeasurable. In the US bus tours have stopped coming. Buses carrying 40 people at a time for hotels and BNBs. Visitors are cancelling, not because they do not want to come, but because they cannot come. Hospital appointments are being missed. People are missing their chemotherapy appointments. Shelves are empty, weddings are missed and funerals are missed, as Willie Rennie said. And where is the compensation for those businesses? They say that we do not want compensation, what we want is ferries, but without the ferries what they need is compensation. Communities are being damaged by this Government, a Government that should be protecting them. Staff are facing abuse. The staff who are trying to serve those communities are at the brunt of the frustration of people who are desperate to travel who cannot. I would say to people that they do not take it out on the staff, but take it out on this Government who I have let you down. The whole fiasco shows the reality of a Government that is not focused on the needs of the people that it should be serving. It is a disgrace that people are cut off, that livelihoods have been damaged and that the whole island economy is being wrecked. It does not have to be like this, and yet the Scottish Government avoids responsibility. It seeks to further division pitting community against community and sector against sector. It needs to stop, it needs to step up and help our island communities, it needs to provide compensation and it needs to provide ferries. I thank the Public Audit Committee for what was an excellent report. Rarely has there been such a scathing committee report, but rarely has there been such a scandal to report on. In fact, in my view, there hasn't been one. Now, the committee blasts what it calls significant failings. That is rather statingly obvious. They said, quotes, the vessels are now millions of pounds over budget and years behind schedule. Scotland's taxpayers and island communities have been badly let down by many of those involved in the project. Correct. They said that there was a lack of transparency, a lack of accountability. There was the issue of the lack of a builder's refund guarantee and ignoring Simal's wish to re-tender. The committee questioned the former First Minister's decision to publicly announce the preferred bidder when she did. They said that there is still uncertainty over which minister had the final sign-off on the contract. Still uncertainty. They branded the programme steering group, which was led by Transport Scotland as weak and toothless. Of course, there were meddling ministers, none of whom has taken the rap. A good quartet of fiddlers can make sweet music, but Mackay, Sweeney, Brown and Sturgeon have struck a bum note with islanders throughout this sorry saga. At least Mr Mackay came to give his side of the story to committee, as did Mr Sturgeon. Sadly, the committee's efforts to pin down Keith Brown came to nothing, leading to the committee to chide him for his lack of co-operation. What did Canteen Keith, last seen stirring up constitutional grievance— Mr Simpson, we will address members by their proper full names, and we will not use nick names in the chamber. What did Canteen Keith Brown, last seen stirring up constitutional grievance? Mr Simpson, I would ask you to apologise and then move on. I will apologise. What did Keith Brown, last seen stirring up constitutional grievance in a member's debate and making a spurious point of order, have to hide? Quite a lot, I suspect. Isn't it significant that none of the key players in this saga, who still belong to this Parliament, are here today to face the music? And it's a sorry saga indeed, with ultimately no ferries yet and hundreds of millions of pounds of our money squandered. For what? All because the SNP were hell bent on giving that yard the contract, even though it plainly wasn't the right thing to do. It gave ministers, including Humza Yousaf, Mr Mackay and the selfie queen herself, Mr Sturgeon, the chance to get their pictures taken in hard hats. Of course, the most infamous of those was the fake launch by Nicola Sturgeon in 2017, known as the Painted on Windows launch, but six years later, still no ferries. My advice to anyone who has to take a decision is to keep SNP ministers well away when the Glenn Sannocks is actually launched into service hopefully next year. As the committee said, there's been a shroud of secrecy hanging over aspects of this. There was the meeting between the discredited former First Minister and Jim McColl, for which there is no minute. Craig Hoy was quite right to say she may have broken the ministerial code, but we have a broken system where the First Minister marks their own homework and that of wayward ministers. That must change. We've also discovered, through FOI, that a meeting between Transport Scotland and CMAL officials on September 29, 2015, just days before Ferguson's was awarded the contract, was also not minited. Whatever could the reason be for such an oversight? We know the SNP members of the committee tried to water down the report. That's not their job, and they should be ashamed of themselves. No amount of spin and bluster can hide the fact that this is the biggest public spending scandal of the devolution age. The project was, of course, cleared once John Swinney was sure that there were no banana skins. There were so many banana skins, you would think that the vessels had already sailed to South America and back. Chance will be a fine thing. Aaron would do. All the time, the islanders are without a ferry and the costs go up and up. We've had the BBC disclosure programme claiming that Ferguson's was given preferential treatment when it won the contract. We now learn that it will be cheaper to start again rather than complete 802 at Port Glasgow, but, of course, we have not been told the figures. We can't assess that decision. That would amount to transparency, and this Government doesn't do that, of course. To listen to SNP members today, with the exception of Alasdair Allan, you would think that nothing had gone wrong. The Government had done absolutely nothing wrong at all, but at least we have had some plain speaking from Craig Hoy, Neil Bibby, Willie Rennie, Brian Whittle and the only green in the chamber today, Jamie Greene. We need to look to the future. What does the future hold for the yard? Again, trying to get an answer on that from the Government is absolutely impossible, because Mr Gray will not tell us what he thinks the future holds. We have had the Project Neptune report, but we do not know what his conclusion is. We do know that there is still a bottomless pit, a blank check, and it seems that it will go on and on. I am just finishing, Mr Sweeney. It is a scandal, the biggest scandal of the devolution age, and somebody has to take responsibility. I thank Richard Leonard and the Public Audit Committee for their resolute scrutiny of Scotland's ferry sector. I also add my thanks to the Auditor General and his team for the quality and depth of their work over recent years. Their scrutiny has enabled debates such as the one that we have held here today, and I think that this Parliament can be proud of the role it has played in improving the way in which the Scottish Government manages its strategic commercial assets and delivers vital services to our communities. I had hoped that, although we were undoubtedly going to hear a variety of different opinions today, that this Parliament should have been united in its determination to support island communities and retain the proud tradition of shipbuilding on the Clyde. As Willie Coffey said, and I pay tribute to Willie Coffey and Colin Beattie, as I do all other members of committees of this Parliament who consider the evidence that is before them and take judgments based on that evidence. I thank them, and I think that it is shameful that those contributions are denigrated, because, as he said, this issue has become so polarised and politicised that, unfortunately, I do not even think that I can say that the proud tradition of shipbuilding on the Clyde is supported unanimously in this Parliament. However, I can assure colleagues that we are committed to expanding and improving the resilience of lifeline services provided to island communities. Alasdair Allan pointed out in his excellent speech why that is so important. We are committed to securing a sustainable and successful future for the Yard and committed to providing opportunities for future generations to learn and practice skills and trades that can define our future as much as they distinguish our past. In that regard, I also want to thank Paul Sweeney for his contribution, his speech and, in particular, his reference to raising our eyes and asking if we want to see commercial shipbuilding on the Clyde in future. I can assure him and colleagues that we do. We want a Yard to improve productivity and compete successfully for new work as it becomes available. In that regard, I also agree with Neil Bibby's contribution in terms of his plea for greater accountability and responsibility to deliver the ferries. I agree and took the decision on providing written authority for 802 for that very purpose. I will keep working with Paul Sweeney, Stuart McMillan and other local representatives to ensure that we work with the management and the staff at the Yard to deliver those ferries within the timescale that management has outlined for us and support them with a forward work programme. I am also encouraged that, in his evidence to the Public Audit Committee last week, David Tideman, the chief executive of Ferguson Marine, suggested that there was at least 250 million pounds of work available for the Yard to compete for. That is a prize worth fighting for. I know that this Parliament will support the efforts of the workforce to attract as much of that business as possible. Paul Sweeney, I thank the minister for giving me on that point. There is lots of shipbuilding work out there in the world to be won. The point is that Scotland will not win any of it unless we have competitive facilities that are invested in, no investment is taking place in Ferguson's or alternative shipbuilding location in the area. There is no builders refund guarantees available in the Scottish economy right now, so what we are going to do is to fix those fundamentals so that we can win some of that 200 million pounds plus business and get some work into those yards. Cabinet Secretary. I thank Paul Sweeney for that contribution. I will absolutely consider his point around financing. We are considering the request that has been made for capital investment into the yard. He is right that in order to ensure greater productivity in the yard, there needs to be investment. We have difficulties with regard to that as he will be aware around ensuring state subsidy. We need to be careful about what we do there, but we are taking those considerations. He can, as other colleagues, assure us that we will do what we can to make sure that that yard is competitive as possible. As Rona Mackay said, my decision to provide a written authority to continue building Hull 802 at Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow was a clear demonstration of the Government's determination to give the yard the support that it needs to create a successful future. I say to Craig Hoy and Brian Whittle that narrow value for money assessment, as they know, does not consider, as I am sure they would support me in placing significant value upon the impact on the yard and the local economy and, of course, the island communities who have to be at the centre of those considerations. I took a decision that was in the interests of our island communities first and foremost—a decision that would protect them from the potential delay of up to two and a half years that would have followed—hold on, I would have followed had we decided to go through the complex time-consuming process of recurring an alternative vessel. Of course, I took a decision that was in the interests of the yard, its dedicated workforce and the community in and around Port Glasgow. They have been through a lot over the past few years, and I wanted to give them a degree of certainty and provide a platform upon which they can build a successful future. I will give way briefly to Mr Simpson. Graham Simpson. Thank you, cabinet secretary, for giving way. Is he prepared today, as he has not been previously, to say how much it will cost to complete 802 at the yard? The information on the estimation from the yard is in the public domain already. Of course, I will do what I can as I have committed to doing both at committee previously and today to look at what more information can be published going forward. I know that the decision that I took was without. I need to watch my time. I'll see if I can come back to Mr McMillan if I've got time before I conclude. No one is pretending that there haven't been mistakes over many years in the delivery of these two new vessels. Audit Scotland has been both clear and constructive in the way in which it has identified things that could have been done differently. I give colleagues an assurance that we are equally as clear in our determination to listen to their suggestions and learn lessons from their reports. That is the best way of ensuring that we provide the services that people have the right to expect and guarantee the future of a proud industry with an illustrious past and, I believe, an exciting future. I'll give way to Stuart McMillan before I close. Stuart McMillan. I thank the cabinet secretary for taking the intervention. I want to put on record the thanks of the community at Port Glasgow and the workforce for the decision that was taken very recently regarding hull 802. When I met up with Shrop Stewards and GMB reps last week, that point was made very clear. I want to put that on record to the Scottish Government. I thank Stuart McMillan for that. That is appreciated. However, my appreciation is to, like Stuart McMillan, to the workforce for their contribution, the hard work and dedication of the people who work in Scotland's ferry sector. I want to acknowledge how difficult it must have been for them to read and hear the negative press and some of the comments in this place today, quite frankly, on such a regular basis. That cannot be easy. I want them all, those who work in the ferries, looking after passengers, those who manage the complex logistics, those who maintain or repair the ferries and those crafting and building the euferries for Scotland's seas. I want to say thank you. We are very lucky to have this whole industry working together on the service of Scotland's seas, and I want to keep it that way. I thank the clerking team for the huge amount of work that they have put into compiling the report and Audit Scotland for their input. I also thank all members around the chamber for their contributions today. I reassure them that so many across the chamber are committed to the scrutiny of the issues raised in the report. While I am pleased to be closing the debate on behalf of the Public Audit Committee, it is with considerable regret that this Parliament is debating, once again, two vessels that should have set sail five years ago and are currently three and a half times over budget. The significant failings throughout the project have let islanders down and have caused disruption to their everyday lives and lessons must be learned. I start by echoing the concerns expressed by the convener about the Scottish Government's response to our report. So short is the response that of a seven-page document, only around half of it addresses the committee's key findings, conclusions and recommendations. The rest of it made the reproduces large sections of our report and lacks the detail that we would have hoped for. Take, for example, the committee's serious concerns about Transport Scotland's role in the project. As CMAL's sponsor, Transport Scotland had a critical role in communicating important information to Scottish ministers on its behalf. We are clear that it consistently failed to reflect CMAL's significant concerns to Scottish ministers, whether that be in relation to the high-profile public announcement of FMAL as a preferred bidder or the awarding of the contract to FMAL. Given the extent of the concerns raised by CMAL regarding the financial risks associated with the contract, Transport Scotland should have sought written authority from Scottish ministers before any further progress was made with the project. Indeed, as it materialised, the absence of a full builders refund guarantee coupled with no general quality standards in the contract resulted in CMAL's position being significantly weakened when problems with the standard of FMAL's work became apparent and those points were covered in detail in Brian Whittle and Jamie Greene's contributions. No comment is offered at all in relation to any of those concerns. The Scottish Government's response does, however, highlight the recent approach that was taken to the written authority provided to secure the continued build of vessel 802 at FMPG. Indeed, it is recognised that the Scottish Public Finance Manual has specific requirements for the notification of any instance of written authority, which must be drawn to the attention of the Auditor General. I welcome that that was adhered to. I also take this opportunity to reiterate the committee's call for the Scottish Government to follow the UK Government's example and proactively publishing the list of all occasions when written authority was sought on its website to improve openness and transparency in this area. Turning next to the committee's concerns about the Scottish Government's commitment to paying additional vessel costs regardless of the final price. Although the Scottish Government has challenged this assertion, the committee remains concerned about the on-going significant risk that costs will continue to rise. That, of course, is now proving to be the case, with the former Deputy First Minister announcing in March that an additional £6 million would be allocated in the 2022-23 financial year. That comes alongside the more recent announcement by the Cabinet Secretary in May, which clarified that additional money will be allocated during the current financial year following a process of due diligence. It is extremely disappointing that, at no point does the Scottish Government's response address the committee's well-founded concerns about these soaring and still unknown final costs, and Willie Rennie raised his concerns of a blank cheque being written, which is also a concern of the committee. The Scottish Government's response does however welcome, and I quote, the report's recognition that there have been significant improvements in procedures and processes by Transport Scotland and CMAL since the procurement of vessels 801 and 802. What is clear to everyone is that one of the main and principal drivers of the catastrophic failings in the process is the breakdown in relationships between the main protagonists, CMAL, Transport Scotland and the Scottish Government and the manufacturers, including probably CalMac, as well. Does the committee give any consideration to what future changes could be done to ensure that those breakdown relationships do not happen again? That was covered in the committee's report, and it has been noted that there has been an improvement in the relationship between them, but we obviously need to keep tabs on that. It would be fairer to say that the report notes some signs of progress. For example, we are encouraged that there appear to be signs of more constructive relations between the new management and the workforce and between FMPG and CMAL. However, the committee wants to see much more progress to ensure that this situation never happens again. In addition, while we note that action taken by the Scottish Government to publish a business investment framework to strengthen its approach to investment in private businesses, we are clear that the work does not stop there. That is why we are calling for more to be done to strengthen the framework to better outline intentions over risk tolerance, risk appetite and the expected public benefit of future interventions. While the Government's response indicates that it is inactive engagement method at Scotland on that matter, it is unclear how or indeed when that will be achieved. I turn next to the intervention of several Scottish ministers throughout the project on which a majority of committee members raised concerns. Central to those concerns is a lack of transparency around why certain decisions were taken, whether that be a lack of documentary evidence to clarify why the former First Minister led on the very public announcement of the preferred bidder, a lack of documentary evidence to explain why Scottish ministers accepted the risks associated in approving the award of the contract FMAIL or that a full record of a meeting between the former director of FMAIL and the former First Minister does not appear to exist. Even more challenging is that poor record keeping means that the Scottish public and this Parliament are in the dark about what exactly happened at some crucial stages of the project. While it is encouraging that the Scottish Government has issued new guidance on the recording of decisions, we are unanimous in calling on the Scottish Government to further review and refine its record keeping procedures. That would facilitate scrutiny and improve both transparency and accountability. I share the concerns expressed by the convener that the Scottish Government's response to that recommendation does not provide the committee with any meaningful detail on how that is being addressed. As the convener has already set out, a number of developments have taken place since our report was published and it is clear that further developments will follow. Notwithstanding our continued scrutiny of the Auditor General's section 22 report on FMPG, we await with interest the net zero energy and transport committee's forthcoming report on a modern and sustainable ferry service for Scotland and the next steps associated with the project Neptune governance review. It is encouraging that the Government shares the committee's opinion that this review does not represent a silver bullet in preventing a similar situation from occurring again. Do I have time to cover members' contributions or do you want me to close? You have time, Mr Ewing. To cover some of the contributions from other members, Graham Simpson spoke of the lack of transparency, accountability and the lack of a builder's refund guarantee. That was mentioned by quite a few members across the chamber. Craig Hoy also spoke of the insufficient evidence to explain why ministers made the decision, and again that is something that the committee wants to have more transparency. He also mentioned island communities now paying the price, and that was something that was also mentioned in contributions from a lot of people around the chamber, Rhoda Grant, Alasdair Allan, Neil Bibby and Stuart McMillan. Stuart McMillan also raised concerns that the shipyard was being criticised, but could I say to Stuart McMillan that the criticism in the report was with those ministers and government bodies who took the decisions that was in the workforce? Paul Sweeney also mentioned the point that we want to be a shipbuilding nation, so we need to look at the basics. Rhoda Grant and her contribution said that we need to sign off a design that will fit harbours, so that she should have been at the procurement process that would have maybe helped. In closing, I take the opportunity to restate the committee's call for a formal review of the project to be undertaken upon completion of the vessels, and this will help the Scottish Government to learn vital lessons for the future so that Scotland's taxpayers and island communities can have confidence in the procurement and construction of future vessels. That concludes the debate on new vessels for the Clyde and the Hebrides arrangements to deliver vessels 801 and 802. It is now time to move on to the next item of business, which is consideration of two parliamentary bureau motions, and I ask George Adam, on behalf of the parliamentary bureau, to move motions 9371 and 9372 on committee remits. Thank you, minister. The question on these motions will be put at decision time, and I am minded to accept a motion without notice under rule 11.2.4 of standing orders that decision time be brought forward to now, and I invite the Minister for Parliamentary Business to move the motion. I am happy to do so, Presiding Officer. The question is that decision time be brought forward to now. Are we all agreed? We are agreed, and there are three questions to be put as a result of today's business. The first is that motion 9375, in the name of Angus Robertson, on retained EU law, revocation and reform bill, UK legislation be agreed. Are we all agreed? Yes. The Parliament is not agreed, therefore we will move to vote, and there will be a short suspension to allow members to access the digital voting system.