An SNP MSP has publicly criticised Ferguson Marine’s former management in the Scottish Parliament, saying foolish decisions embedded in a previous business plan left the state-owned yard uncompetitive and led to a failed vessel tender.
Speaking during a debate on the Public Audit Committee’s report into Ferguson Marine (Port Glasgow) Holdings Limited, Stuart McMillan, SNP MSP for Greenock and Inverclyde, said flawed assumptions by management directly contributed to the yard losing out on phase one of the Small Vessels Replacement Programme.
McMillan told the chamber that management had made a fundamental error by assuming a direct award would be forthcoming. “It was foolish in the extreme for the yard management to decide to include the small vessel replacement programme 1 direct award order in the previous business plan.”
He said that decision had clear financial consequences, “The subsequent wage bill was bloated, so its bids were always going to be exorbitant.”
Despite quality being weighted more heavily than price in the tender evaluation, McMillan said the yard had squandered a genuine opportunity to secure work.
“The 65 per cent to 35 per cent ratio of quality and cost respectively gave the yard’s board and management a prime opportunity to win the work. However, they did not just fail—they failed spectacularly, letting down the workers, the local community and the taxpayer.”
The intervention is politically significant as McMillan represents the constituency in which the yard is based and is a member of the governing SNP, at a time when ministers are under pressure to show that Ferguson Marine can win contracts beyond the delayed MV Glen Rosa. McMillan also criticised instability in senior leadership following nationalisation, arguing that repeated turnover among executives had been costly and corrosive.
“The committee and anybody who will listen will have heard about the revolving door of highly paid senior personnel coming and going within months, costing a small fortune. That has not been a good use of taxpayers’ money, and it certainly has not helped morale on the shop floor.”
While McMillan supported the Scottish Government’s £14.2 million commitment to modernise the yard, he linked lost orders directly to failures under the previous chair, “There has been one bit of good news. That chair has gone from the yard, and I welcome that, because the yard management at that time lost orders and the workforce deserves better.”
He stressed that the yard’s long-term future depended on effective leadership and competitiveness rather than further delay, saying “The key to boosting the yard’s efficiency and putting it in a position to secure some of that work is for the board and the management to work effectively and efficiently and to turn our yard into a yard that we can all be proud of, and to support our workers.”
Although the yard has secured subcontracted fabrication work with BAE Systems, MSPs across parties stressed that long-term sustainability depends on winning whole-ship contracts rather than remaining a secondary supplier.