For Argyll can show, on documented evidence, that Transport Minister, Keith Brown, misled the Scottish Parliament in answers he gave on 5th September 2012 to questions on the award of the Northern Isles Ferry Services contract from two Scottish Labour MSPs, Richard Baker and Dr Elaine Murray.
This evidence, some obtained under Freedom of Information, requires the Transport Minister, as others recently before him – including the First Minister and the Education Secretary – to appear at the chamber to offer a formal apology.
It also substantially supports the case of Richard Baker MSP in his call this week, reported here yesterday, for the Ombudsman to investigate the Scottish Government’s tendering and award of the contract for the Northern Isles Ferry Services.
Transport Minister’s statements to parliament on 5th September 2012
This session began at 17.00 with the Transport Minster, Keith Brown, making a ministerial statement to the Scottish Parliament on the ferry services to Orkney.
This was followed by questions, during which the Minister made the following statement in answer to a question from Richard Baker, MSP for NE Scotland:
Mr Brown said – and the bold emphases are ours:
‘Richard Baker asked whether I agreed to the NorthLink tender in the knowledge that the CalMac tender cost less.
‘I have no idea whether the CalMac tender cost less.
‘It did not qualify to be considered.
‘It could not be looked at.
‘That is the process, and we have to go by that process.’
The final question in the session came from Dr Elaine Murray, MSP for Dumfriesshire, who asked: ‘Is the minister telling us that CalMac, which is a subsidiary of a company that is wholly owned by the Scottish Government, submitted an incompetent bid for the NorthLink contract?
‘Was that the reason for the resignation last week of Archie Robertson, the chief executive of David MacBrayne?’
The Ministers’s response to this – and the bold emphais is again ours, was:
‘That resignation is a matter between Archie Robertson and the board of CalMac.
‘I did not say that the bid was incompetent; I said that I had not seen the figures that attached to it, because it did not pass the final stage [Ed: our emphasis].
‘I will go no further than that just now, but I will say, for the last time, that the ferry service in the northern isles replicates the best elements of what we had before and will further improve them.’
Information obtained from Transport Scotland by For Argyll under FoI
One month ago, on 13th November 2012, two months after these statements to parliament, For Argyll received the following responses from Transport Scotland to four questions we had asked under Freedom of Information, in connection with our independent pursuit of the conduct of the Northern Isles Ferry Services contract.
The questions we asked were:
- Please confirm the companies who submitted bids for the NorthLink routes.
- Please confirm the companies who reached the final round of scoring.
- Which companies, if any, withdrew from the process?
- Were any bids deemed non-compliant and, if so, who submitted those bids?
The answers we received from Transport Scotland under FOI were as follows.
Q 1: Please confirm the companies who submitted bids for the NorthLink routes.
A 1: Final tenders were received from:
- NorthLink Ferries Ltd
- Serco
- Shetland Line [1984] Ltd
- P&O Ferries
Q2: Please confirm the companies who reached the final round of scoring.
A2: The bidders who reached the final round of scoring were:
- NorthLink Ferries Ltd
- Serco
- Shetland Line [1984] Ltd
- P&O Ferries
Q3: Which companies, if any, withdrew from the process?
A3: In addition to the bidders mentioned in our responses to questions 1 and 2 above, two other companies had been invited to participate in the dialogue phase of the competition but withdrew from the process before the stage where final bids were invited. These were:
- Pentland Ferries ltd
- Sea-Cargo
Q4: Were any bids deemed non-compliant and, if so, who submitted those bids.
A4: No bids were deemed non-compliant.
Contradictory evidence from Transport Scotland
As quoted above, the Transport Minister told Mr Baker in answer to a parliamentary question on 5th September 2012 that:
‘I have no idea whether the CalMac tender cost less.
‘It did not qualify to be considered.
‘It could not be looked at.‘
In the answer to Dr Murray, the Minister repeated his assertion to Mr Baker that the NorthLink Ferries Ltd bid had not qualified to be considered.
Yet, over two months later in answer to our questions under FOI, Transport Scotland confirmed [Q2} that NorthLink Ferries had indeed reached the final scoring stage and [Q4] that its bid had not been deemed non-compliant.
In what way does this support the Minister’s unequivocal statements to parliament that the NorthLink Ferries Ltd bid had not qualified for consideration?
In the light of these answers under FOI, the only way one could alternatively interpret the Minister’s parliamentary response to Dr Elaine Murray – ‘ I said that I had not seen the figures that attached to it, because it did not pass the final stage ‘ – is that the Minister had nothing at all to do with the tendering process until his officials presented him with the single identity of the winning bidder. This is not the case.
Moreover, such an interpretation would then contradict the answer Mr Brown had given earlier in the session to Richard Baker: ‘It did not qualify to be considered. It could not be looked at.‘
The unequivocal and material differences between the information given by Transport Scotland and its Minister on these two occasions would indicate that they respect the potency of Freedom of Information more highly than they do the authority of the Scottish Parliament.
It is now up to the Scottish Parliament and the Ombudsman to pursue this matter as they see fit – but resting upon their actions is nothing less than the upholding of the imperative for probity and trustworthiness in government and in governance.
The Minister is to make a statement in the chamber at 3pm today on the possible RMT strike action on the Northern Ferries routes, in response to problems arising from the conduct of Serco, the chosen bidder for the contract.
Notes:
- The full transcript of the Ministerial statement and the exchange of questions and answers at the Scottish Parliament on 5th September 2012 is here: http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28862.aspx?r=7524&i=68634&c=1388398&s=orkney
- The letter received by For Argyll from Transport Scotland in response to our [second] FOI request on the handling of the Northern Isles Ferry Services Contract is here as a downloadable pdf: Lynda Henderson – FOI-12-01566 – response letter-1
Note also that the Minister and MSPs use an inaccurate shorthand which, since matters at the Scottish Parliament are a document of record, is slack practice, confusing for the electorate and should be abandoned. This marks the Scottish Parliament as not yet beyond the parochial. Repeated reference is made in the parliamentary exchanges on this matter to ‘CalMac’. CalMac is responsible for Clyde and Hebridean Ferries and has nothing to do with the tender or contract for the Northern Isles Ferry Services. CalMac’s then corporate stablemate was NorthLink Ferries Limited, which was the operator and bidder concerned in this matter. [Both are amongst the group of companies within the David MacBrayne group, all of which, including the parent company, are fully owned by the Scottish Government of the day.]