Ferguson’s workers deserve chance to rebuild reputation battered by fiasco not of their making, says shipyard veteran

From Lochinvar and Lord of the Isles to Hebrides, Mull, Lewis and Arran, Alex Logan helped build them all.

His shipyard, Ferguson Marine, has launched a third of the 36-strong Caledonian MacBrayne fleet ferrying islanders and visitors around the West Coast today.

“People have short memories,” said Logan, a plater who arrived in the Port Glasgow yard straight from school and remains there 47 years later.

“Before all this, we built ships and we built good ones. Given the chance, we still can.”

Glen Sannox and Glen Rosa criticism

Despite all the ferries to launch successfully from the last commercial yard on the Lower Clyde, its reputation for excellence has been holed by two more: the Glen Sannox and Glen Rosa, both hugely delayed and over budget.

The slow and troubled progress of the ferries towards the slipway has been the focus of more than a decade of political and media scrutiny.

Logan, the GMB Scotland convener at the yard, understands why but cannot hide his frustration at the relentless onslaught of criticism.

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He said: “I have been at Ferguson’s all my working life and it is tough to see it getting battered day after day. You would never guess it from the coverage but the workforce here knows how to make good ships.

“All we read about are ‘ferry fiascos’ as if we don’t know one end of a ship from the other. We’ve been here for more than a hundred years and, given a chance, could be here for many more.

“Mistakes, serious mistakes, were made with these ferries but they were not made by the workers. They were not made on the shopfloor.”

Overhaul our ferry system to improve services for islanders, demands union

Logan believes the biggest mistake was ever taking on Rosa and Sannox after Ferguson’s was pulled out of administration in 2014 following 112 years of building ships on the Lower Clyde.

Engineering tycoon Jim McColl took over, with the support of then first minister Alex Salmond and his deputy Nicola Sturgeon, but the workers’ relief was short lived when the takeover was followed by a contract for two huge CalMac ferries the following year.

Logan said: “We had a good reputation for building small ferries but these two were far bigger than anything we had done before and the plan was for us to build them side by side?

“I didn’t think that was possible and said so. Anybody that knew anything about building ships said so too. Nobody was listening though, nobody in charge anyway.”

‘We want to turn the page’

More than a decade later, Sannox is finally on the water, seven years late but now sailing to Arran, with good reviews, while Rosa is delayed again and still waiting for a completion date.

Logan said: “Nobody wants to finish this job more than us. We want to turn the page.

“An awful lot of money has been spent on these ships and that needs to be explained but, as a yard, as a place of work, we need to move on.”

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The future of Ferguson’s is still uncertain after it failed to win the contract to build seven new ferries for CalMac as part of the Scottish Government’s small vessels replacement programme. Instead, the £175 million contract went to the Remontowa yard in the Polish city of Gdansk.

GMB Scotland, with the backing of Inverclyde politicians, campaigned for the direct award of the work to Ferguson’s, which has a thriving apprenticeship scheme, and is now calling for the second phase of the small ferries programme to go straight to Port Glasgow.

At the STUC Congress, starting in Dundee tomorrow, the union will hail the skills and commitment of the Ferguson workforce and urge delegates to back calls for the yard to become a “cornerstone of an industrial strategy providing Scotland’s publicly owned ferry fleet”.

‘Ferries are a lifeline’

Logan believes that is possible as part of wide-ranging reform of how Scotland commissions and builds its ferries with Ferguson’s, now state owned, playing a central role.

He said: “We were given a contract to build two big ferries that we were not equipped for. That has been a disaster for taxpayers and this yard.

“Then a contract for small ferries, exactly the kind of ships we successfully built for years, goes to Poland? We are told there are rules that mean there can be no direct award but when civil servants say rules, we hear excuses. It makes little sense.”

It made even less sense, according to his union, when it emerged that the wider economic and social value of the contract to the communities of Inverclyde was not even considered by Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd (CMAL), the owner of ferries and harbours, before sending the work to Poland.

Logan said: “The ferries serving our islands are not a luxury, something nice but not essential.

“They are lifelines for island communities and should be an absolute priority for Scottish ministers.

“Is it really beyond us to have a single company commissioning and operating ferries, working hand in glove with a nationalised yard capable of ­delivering a steady stream of new ships to replace those going out of service? It does not seem beyond other countries.

“Ferguson’s should be a centre of excellence, a yard building the ferries Scotland needs, a yard to be proud of. It has been before and can be again.”

State-owned ferry company would be major opportunity for our islands and industries

© Shutterstock / D MacDonald

By Brian Wilson, Former Labour trade minister who lives in the Western Isles

The workers of Ferguson Marine should have been listened to 10 years ago and they should be listened to now.

If ministers and quangos had heeded concerns raised in Port Glasgow over the Glen Rosa and Glen Sannox, the damage inflicted in recent years could have been avoided.

Island communities have been badly failed and the reputation of a skilled workforce needlessly damaged. Given all that, the status quo cannot be allowed to continue.

A new unified state-owned ferry company working in partnership with Scottish shipbuilders would be a major opportunity for our islands and our maritime industries.

Ferguson’s had, for decades, built fine vessels for Caledonian MacBrayne (CalMac) and there is no need to build our ferries in Turkey or Poland when our own workers, properly equipped and supported, are more than capable.

The Scottish Government is soon expected to award the west coast contract to CalMac for another 10 years but this must come with fundamental change to the governance of our ferry network.

The tripartite arrangement involving the civil servants of Transport Scotland, Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd (CMAL) in charge of infrastructure and procurement, and CalMac running operations has been an unmitigated disaster for island communities and taxpayers.

It was claimed that procurement and operations had to be separated to meet European Commission competition rules, but there has never been genuine competition as CalMac kept the contract as “a client” of Transport Scotland and CMAL.

A new long-term contract award can finally close the book on that fiction and allow CMAL and CalMac to be unified in a single publicly owned company.

With 10 years of stability and an orderly procurement schedule, the opportunity exists to forge a new partnership between our ferry company and our maritime industries.

The new CalMac should operate at arm’s length from ministers and its board should include statutory representation from island councils and workers making it, above all, accountable to the communities it serves.

In 2020 the Scottish Government commissioned consultants, very expensive consultants, to examine a way forward for our ferries.

International comparisons are rarely straightforward but in British Columbia, Canada, they found a publicly owned company responsible for both ferry procurement and operations, working with autonomy within parameters set by ministers and striving to be properly accountable to the island communities it serves. It may not be perfect – nothing is – but it seems to work.

Is it unreasonable to believe Scotland could have one too?