The Scottish Conservative Party is set to call for an increase to long-term financing for Scotland's ferry fleet, which its transport spokesman Graham Simpson said is “ageing and ever more unreliable”.
A report from Audit Scotland is expected this week on the Ferguson Marine shipyard, which was taken into public ownership in 2019 and subsequently shown to have problems that led to the delay and increased cost of two ferries.
The Glen Sannox and the as-yet-unnamed 802 were due to be delivered in 2018, but have since been pushed back to April and July 2023 and projected to cost twice as much as initially thought.
On Monday, Luke van Beek, a former independent adviser to the Scottish Government on ship building, said the cost could rise as high as £400m.
“I assume the current estimate of cost is somewhere in the £350m to £400m bracket,” he told The Times. “The cost of completing them is likely to exceed the cost of starting again, particularly if they were to start again on a simpler design.”
Simpson said the Scottish Government had “dodged questions on this fiasco for too long”, adding: “From endless delays, to spiralling costs, to too-short cables, the SNP’s nationalised shipyard has become an utter laughing stock.
“The SNP have dodged questions on this fiasco for too long,” he concluded. “The Scottish Conservatives are bringing this debate on Wednesday to stand up for island communities and force the SNP to answer for these shocking failures.”
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