Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
There are all sorts of things wrong with the procurement assumptions at CMAL, the state body that owns Scotland’s entire maritime transport infrastructure. On top of all of them, in this specific instance, was the SNP’s political imperative to prevent the last commercial shipbuilder on the Clyde from going bust and then chucking it an eye-catching order for two great big Hebridean ferries that would look great on the front of the newspapers with Alex and Nicola waving from the bridge.
Ferguson Marine had never built a ferry this big, and it was now asked to build two of them simultaneously, and also to incorporate novel dual fuel technology that was entirely beyond its experience or expertise. Add to that CMAL’s slapdash, fluid and lackadaisical approach to design and specification and it was a disaster in the making. The reason for the latest six-month delay announced this week is that, incredibly, so many years down the line, they are *still* coming to build bits of these things and finding that the bits haven’t even been properly designed and specced.
CMAL is State owned and Scottish ministers are its ‘shareholders’. Ferguson Marine is likewise State owned.
The shytte-show that is CMAL is squarely the responsibility of the SNP who have been in government for 16 years. And the utter farce that is Ferguson Marine is not something the SNP can claim to have inherited. It is entirely of their own invention.
|
So, not far off two years later, one of these (MV Glen Sannox) is cruising the Firth of Clyde on sea trials and due to enter service next month. CMAL - the Scottish ferry procurement business which is wholly state owned, with Scottish Ministers as its shareholders - has produced an environmental assessment at the request of said ministers, who are desperate for a good headline for when the ship enters service (six years late and four times over budget).
The problem is, CMAL has produced an assessment so optimistic it would make Eric Idle blush. It doesn’t account for known quirks in the new fuel system (such as the fact they periodically belch pure unburned methane into the atmosphere) nor the fact that LNG has to be shipped to the UK from Qatar at significant environmental cost.
These new ferries, Wee Nippy Sturgeon once boasted, were emblems of Scotland’s bold, world-leading green future. They are late and over-budget in part because of the green technology installed in them. Yet now, to the surprise of absolutely nobody outside the fanatical ‘wheesht for Indy’ cult, yet another one of Nicola’s boasts turns out to have no more substance than Brig’o’Doon.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy87e72yg3o