Islanders desperately hope that 2025 will finally see end to sorry ferries saga - Murdo Fraser

It is now more than seven years since the Glen Sannox was “launched” by the then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, painted-on windows and all. In a staggering exercise in hubris, the media were called to Port Glasgow to watch the vessel slip into the water, ignoring the reality that it was nowhere near complete, lacking decks 6 and 7, and with dummy funnels. Despite the rain, cheering crowds, including representatives of the Arran community, looked forward to the much-needed replacement ship coming into service.

Here we are, seven years later, and the boat is finally ready. Over the intervening period there have been regular complaints from islanders about the inadequacy of the ferry service, and in particular its unreliability. For a community whose economy is very heavily dependent upon tourism, the impact of this failure by the state-owned CalMac Ferries has been devastating.

There have been numerous inquiries and investigations into what went wrong with the Glen Sannox, and its sister ship the MV Glen Rosa which still awaits completion. Successive managers at the Ferguson shipyard have blamed their predecessors for bad choices.

A major complicating factor was the decision taken by Scottish Ministers that the new ferries would have hybrid engines, capable of running on liquified natural gas (LNG) as well as marine diesel. This exercise in “green washing” not only massively complicated the build for Ferguson, but added substantially to the cost. We now know that the original tender price for the two boats of £97 million is likely to be exceeded four-fold.

To add insult to injury, it was confirmed this week that the carbon footprint of the Glen Sannox will be far larger than the diesel boat it replaces. An emissions analysis by CalMac has calculated the Glen Sannox will emit 10,391 equivalent tonnes of CO2 a year, compared with just 7,732 for the MV Caledonian Isles. Whilst the Glen Sannox is a larger ship, this does not fully account for the increase in emissions.

The LNG which the Glen Sannox will run on has to be imported from Qatar, and when that is taken into account it might be better for the planet to just run the ship on diesel. Professor Tristan Smith from University College London’s Energy Institute, told the BBC: “In a best-case scenario there is a negligible benefit of using LNG, and at worst there would be a deterioration”.

Arran residents will be keeping their fingers crossed that from January 13th all will go well with the Glen Sannox, and they will finally have a regular and reliable service to the mainland. But their problems do not end here. Rather than run from Ardrossan, the Glen Sannox will run from Troon, increasing the journey time from 55 minutes to 1 hour 20 minutes. This arrangement will be in place until the Ardrossan port is rebuilt and modernised, a process expected to take around two years. There is significant scepticism as to whether this work will ever be completed.

People who should not be held responsible for this farce are the workers at Ferguson Marine, who must now worry about their future given the difficulty the yard currently has in attracting new work. Scottish Ministers regularly defend their decisions on funding the two new ferries by claiming that it protected jobs at the yard, but a simple calculation tells us that it might have been cheaper to give each worker a £1 million pay-off rather than persevere with the contracts.

The real guilty people here are, of course, subsequent SNP Ministers who made political decisions both to place the contracts at a yard which quite clearly did not have the capability to fulfil them, and to impose a novel hybrid engine system which added an additional level of complexity to the build. The current First Minister John Swinney, in government for all but a few months of the period of the build, has to take responsibility, as have a succession of other Cabinet Secretaries and Ministers. Not one has offered an apology, far less their resignation. The whole episode has been an embarrassing shambles so typical of all that has gone wrong in SNP Scotland.

It is not just islanders on Arran who are concerned about the future of the vital ferry links. Scotland’s ferry fleet is aging, and overdue for replacement. There are currently four new boats being constructed in Turkey due to be delivered this year, and more will be required.

It must be doubtful, to say the least, that any of these will be constructed at a yard in Scotland, or even within the United Kingdom. The irony of a nationalist Scottish Government building Scottish ferries at yards in Turkey, and supporting the Turkish economy, should not be lost. But for those dependent upon these lifeline services, I suspect they would rather have efficient, reliable and affordable Turkish-built ships, rather than the alternative even if it was supporting jobs here.

The lesson of this whole sorry saga is that economic nationalism may be superficially attractive, but in the end it can leave us all worse off. And those responsible for taking decisions that end up doing so much damage, and costing so much, have to be held accountable for them. At least we should all resolve that in 2025 there should be no more photocalls with half-built ships.