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Well, in answer to the last part of your question, I think I have referenced that the latest cost assessment by the current management of Ferguson’s is being scrutinised by the Government. I am not able to give you the outcome of that process, because it is not concluded yet. The current Scottish Government-endorsed estimate from March 2022, in terms of completing the vessels, is known. If there are any increases on that as a result of the latest assessment, that will be properly notified to Parliament in the normal way, but that process is under way and is not complete. I will undertake to go away and come back to you with the costs around things such as Tim Hair’s salary. Obviously, we want not only to complete the vessels—although that is the immediate priority—but the shipyard to have a good, sustainable and successful future. I make no apology for the Government continuing to behave and act in a way that supports that objective.

I think that the political scrutiny of the issue is absolutely 100 per cent justified. It is the understatement of the decade for me to say that the contract has not gone as the Government would have expected or hoped, so I do not complain about the scrutiny and the pressure, or the fact that I am sitting here now having these discussions. That is entirely legitimate and understood.

However, I repeat what I said earlier. Whoever deserves to be under that scrutiny and to take responsibility, or a share of it, for what has happened, that is not the workforce. As Kevin Hobbs told the committee, there is no question about the quality of the work. I have been into Ferguson’s shipyard on many occasions. Obviously, the workforce will change, and people will come and go, but there will be a core workforce that has been there for a long time.

Those workers are skilled shipbuilders and do a fantastic job; they do not deserve and should not get any of the criticism that is, rightly, directed at others—including, on some aspects of this, the Scottish Government. Assuming that they get the right support and the right project management, and that everybody else does their job in the way that we would want and expect, I have every confidence in their ability to build those vessels—and, hopefully, many vessels, long into the future—at that shipyard.

If you read, as I have now done, the submission of 20 August to Keith Brown, seeking approval for the preferred bidder—and if memory serves me correctly—you will see that it was always intended that it would be publicly announced. The suggestion in that submission is that it would be the transport minister who did it. At some point after that, in the course of the process—which goes on literally every day in Government—of looking at the announcements that were coming up, judgments would have been made about whether the profile, subject matter and importance of the announcement meant that it should be a minister making the announcement or that it should be a First Ministerial announcement. That would have emerged as a result of the consideration that is what special advisers and communications officials do. They would have come to me to say, “There is a proposal that you should make this announcement,” and I would have said, “Yes, I will do that.”

I am happy to go and look at what came out of that meeting. From what I remember, I would have then asked officials to do certain things.

Therefore, clearly, he will have views, and I might have more sympathy with some of those views than with others.

Throughout that whole period, the Scottish Government was largely looking at how we could help deal with the cash flow financial issues because, without that, we could not make progress on the vessels, and we rigorously looked at all options. The Scottish Government gave the budgetary cover for CMAL to change the milestone payments and accelerate the final payment. We looked at and delivered loan provision for CMAL. Later, after the second loan, I certainly had concerns about Jim McColl’s adherence to some of the agreements that we had reached. We also looked at the different option that CBC put to us.

I would go further than that. Certainly, at the point at which we got to nationalisation, had we not nationalised, in my view, the yard would have closed, and the vessels would never have been completed. Every decision that a Government takes on any issue involves a balance of risk. Clearly, in the period before we took public ownership in December 2019, there was a whole process of exploring and considering all the issues around nationalisation and alternatives to it but, by the time that we got to that point, it was not just the preferred option; it was the only viable option that was available.

Sure, but, to be clear, that would have meant that—undoubtedly, in my view—the yard would have closed, and there would have been no route to completing the vessels. However difficult and unsatisfactory the route to completing the vessels has proved to be, at that point, there would have been no route to completing the vessels, and those employed at the yard would have been without that employment.

Our—and my—fundamental responsibility is to ensure that we deliver the contract, that the vessels are completed and that we properly learn the lessons that need to be learned. I am very serious about that responsibility.

We considered the issue of the second loan. Obviously, all Government investment in private companies, whatever form that takes, has to satisfy state aid procurement rules and the national ethics and integrity policy rules, and there will often be a judgment that the Government can invest more only if the company is investing, in order to satisfy those various tests. There was an issue at the outset or in the early stages of consideration around the £30 million loan that, if the Government was able to do more, it would require Clyde Blowers to also invest more. I certainly recollect being clear that that position had to be made clear to Clyde Blowers.

If I fast forward to after we had made the decision on the second loan and reached the agreement with Clyde Blowers, to be frank, soon after that—I was involved at that time—I became concerned that it felt as if the ink was not even dry on the agreement and Clyde Blowers was not fulfilling the requirement on it as part of the agreement. In summary, that was to invest its own equity as well as drawing down the Scottish Government loan.

Towards the end of 2018, that was a significant concern. In my mind, it raised issues of a lack of good faith in the process, and at that point I gave officials an instruction that there should be no further drawdown by Clyde Blowers of that loan until we had resolved the issue of what I think was a breach of the loan conditions. There was then a process of doing that. There was a resolution of that issue and the loan was then drawn down, but behind that lay a concern, which I certainly had at that point, that we had entered an agreement in good faith but that that good faith was not necessarily being honoured at that point.

There is another point that may be worth making, which I will come on to in a second.

Like you and the committee, I am not an expert on shipbuilding contracts—although I know more about them than I might ever have wanted to, unfortunately, because of the situation—but my understanding is that the approach to the milestone payments, the negotiation about the particular structure and the process of triggering those payments are not unique to the contract. They are standard in shipbuilding contracts. If I am wrong on any aspect of that, others can give you a more expert opinion, but that is my understanding.

There might be a legitimate argument that that should change. As I have said, in a Scottish context, given our experience with the vessels in question, we should look at whether it should change. However, if that took the Scottish approach to contracts for shipbuilding, which is a global industry, out of the standard, I guess that there would be issues with that that would have to be considered as well.

The other point that it is important to make is about what happened as the milestones were reached. Going back to 8 October 2015, one of the mitigations that was put in place against the lack of a full builders refund guarantee was that CMAL took ownership of the vessel and the assets at each stage of the construction process. Therefore, as CMAL made payments, it took ownership of assets that were equivalent to those payments. As I understand it, that is how it works in such contracts, but it was the case that CMAL was getting value for those payments.

We all have responsibility and lessons to learn but, to be frank, I do not think that I have heard the people who owned FMEL talk about the lessons that they should be learning about this point. Clearly, the project management—the process of putting the vessels together—was not happening in the way that it should have done.