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It's time to end the chaos in Scotland's ferry service
Publicly owned CalMac, which provides lifeline ferry services to many inhabited islands, is in crisis — we must centre island communities and unions in creating a new system, with the boats built here in Scotland, writes KATY CLARK MSP
Ferries are frequently cancelled at short notice causing chaos.
Photo shows CalMac's MV Hebrides which serves the Tarbert/Lochmaddy to Uig route.
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FERRIES on routes which islanders rely on for essential travel to work, for medical appointments or to see family, are frequently cancelled at short notice causing chaos.
The problems mainly result from the failure of the Scottish government to invest in new fleet over many years. Covid-related staff shortages have compounded this.
The botched contract for two ferries being constructed at the nationalised Ferguson Marine in Port Glasgow, intended for the Ardrossan to Arran route, one of the busiest in Scotland, has made the situation worse.
The First Minister herself launched one of these ferries on the Clyde in 2017 to great fanfare.
Five years later the ferries are still not in operation and require extensive further work. It’s hoped they will start operating next year.
The project has been plagued with difficulties, delivery repeatedly delayed, the cost two-and-a-half times its original budget of £97 million, with senior managers tasked with turning things around paid multimillion-pound sums but failing to deliver.
An Audit Scotland report recently found Scottish ministers ignored advice not to proceed with the original 2015 contract due to fears about financial safeguards.
The yard was nationalised in 2019, but the problems at Ferguson Marine were well established years before that and the Scottish government’s handling of the project has been shambolic from the start.
Scotland urgently needs new ferries: around half the fleet are over their life expectancy and over 1,000 sailings have been cancelled in just five years due to mechanical problems.
Only two major vessels on major routes have been delivered since 2007.
The requirement to replace the Calmac fleet presents a real opportunity to help rebuild the shipbuilding sector in Scotland. But the most recent Scottish government award of a contract to build two more ferries has gone to a Turkish yard rather than anywhere in Britain.
Unsurprisingly, some islanders will tell you they don’t care where ferries are built, who owns them or who delivers the service to run them — as long as they run.
That impulse is understandable: cancelled sailings mean cancelled doctor’s appointments and work shifts, missed holidays, weddings and funerals.
The Scottish Conservatives point to the Ferguson example to undermine public ownership and failing services more broadly to advocate privatisation of delivery.
Their argument is deceptively simple: the SNP government cannot be trusted to build, deliver or run ferries, so we should bring in private providers.
This all rests on the flawed assumption that the free market is a flawless mechanism of fairness and efficiency, which has been shown to be far from the truth time after time.
The recent dismissal of the P&O workforce highlights the poor employment practices so many seafarers have experienced over many years, with companies relying on “flags of convenience” and a badly regulated crewing culture.
In Scotland, there’s a fragmented system with ports owned by a mix of trusts, councils and private companies such as Peel Ports.
Whilst government quango CMAL procures the vessels to be used, public operator CalMac delivers most services. There are also a range of private operators on some routes.
The Scottish government must now work with island communities and trade unions to come forward with a strategy to build ferries in Scotland operated in the public sector with a unionised workforce as part of an integrated public transport system.
Islanders and the workforce must also have a role in decision making. Different decisions would have been made in the past if islanders’ representations for smaller vessels for the Arran-Ardrossan route had been listened to. The oversized, expensive and over-complex ferries on the Clyde would not have been ordered, for example.
We need to loudly make the case for the public ownership of ferries. Outsourcing ferry provision and construction is expensive, inefficient and destabilising, allowing firms to undercut workers’ pay and safety standards and profit off the back of lifeline daily services.
Calmac should stay in the public sector but as part of a ferry service which includes CMAL and the ports and which puts islanders and the workforce at the heart of decision making.
Katy Clark is the Scottish Labour MSP for West Scotland. Twitter — @KatySClark.
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