MSP’s can be and are fed parliamentary questions by interested parties in their constituencies.
Clued-up and responsible MSPs will make sure that they either already know – or work to know, the ins and outs of an issue before putting down the questions they have been given.
Where they don’t bother and where the source of the questions is not the sharpest, such questions can boomerang on the interests of the constituent – and will certainly provide embarrassment for an MSP whose ignorance can be exposed.
Both of these albatrosses have come home to rest on the unfortunate Highlands and Islands MSP, David Stewart, normally a cannier operator than is evident from this instance.
Mr Stewart has lodged a series of parliamentary questions [PQs]. Most of these relate in some way to the Gourock-Dunoon passenger ferry service protest, in which the Deputy First Minister has intervened. Many of the questions simply make no sense. Some of them, which would seem to have been sourced from around the Dunoon-Gourock Ferry Action Group, offer the fattest of hostages to the fortunes of that group’s own interests.
The Ferry Regulator question
Mr Stewart inquires of the Scottish Government: ‘… what plans it has to introduce a ferry regulator; whether the regulator would have the power to control ticket prices, and what impact a passenger-only service on Dunoon-Gourock route would have on these plans’.
The Scottish Government’s Ferries Review made it clear that there was no need for a Ferry Regulator since the state owns, through CMAL, pretty well all of the ports and harbours; through Transport Scotland tenders the routes hence the Scottish Government sets the timetables and controls fares on almost all of the ferry services in Scotland. There is no comparative regulation to be done.
While a local protest group could not be expected to know this, we would absolutely have expected an MSP – and especially a Highlands an Islands MSP with lifeline ferries a major focus of life in the region – to have been familiar with the Ferries Review; and with the nature and function of a regulator.
Moreover, a regulator could have no purview on the operations or the prices charged by a private sector operator – a matter to which both the source of the question and the MSP appear to be blind.
The ‘optimum weather reliability’ question
Mr Stewart asks the Scottish Government: ‘… what its position is on the suggestion in the report, Gourock-Dunoon Ferry Service: Feasibility Study of a Future Passenger and Vehicle Service with the Vehicle Portion being non-Subsidised, that vessels on the service should be at least 40 metres long in order to provide optimum weather reliability.’
The question majors on a piece of fluff – ‘optimum weather reliability’. What exactly is that? 100%? 70%? 30%? We can find no record of any official benchmark for ‘optimum weather reliability’.
This is also where the rebound factor comes into play.
Following energetic campaigning from the ferry action group, the Deputy First Minister [DFM], then also Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure and Investment [with Transport Scotland answering to her], ordered that MV Coruisk should be deployed for a pilot winter period service of 11 weeks over 2013-14, as a supplement to the Argyll Ferries two-boat service.
Coruisk was deployed, with both the action group and the DFM specifically intending the boat to improve the weather reliability of the Argyll Ferries’ passenger service, regularly claimed by the action group to be unacceptable.
In action, Coruisk made eight crossings a day where the two Argyll Ferries Boats, continuing to run the route, together made between 56 and 60. Coruisk cancelled 35 (6.7%) sailings where Ali Cat cancelled 159 (8.4%) and Argyll Flyer 239 (8.0%) . While Coruisk sailed 28 times when the other boats could not, she cancelled another 29 sailings for weather related reasons.
On reliability issues, Coruisk kept to timetable on only 49.55% of her sailings – compared with 95.71% reliability for Argyll Flyer and 93.72% reliability for the much derided Ali Cat.
Coruisk was deployed against professional advice to the DFM from CalMac, her normal operators, who warned of her windage, her inability to keep to the scheduled timetable of Argyll Ferries and her operating costs. The DFM’s wisdom, however, clearly dictated that the Coruisk was the solution to the action groups’ complaints on this service and deployed she was.
So with the DFM’s certain faith in her performance, Coruisk’s must now be the accepted benchmark of optimum reliability performance. This makes 49.55% the acceptable optimum reliability benchmark on schedule – and an easily achievable one.
Moreover at 65 metres, Coruisk comfortably exceeds the 40 metre length for ‘optimum weather reliability’ cited in the Stewart question – compared with 26 metres for Argyll Flyer which, with Ali Cat, never managed to get down to Coruisk’s 49.55% benchmark timetable reliability performance.
Coruisk in fact proved just how good a service Argyll Ferries delivers to the town; and leaves the Ferry Action Group with no further defensible complaint. At no point have the Action Group criticised the performance delivered by the Coruisk – and they have in fact started the campaign to have her returned to the route next winter, demonstrating that hers is the ‘optimum weather reliability’ performance with which they are satisfied. [?]
The ‘monopoly’ question
Mr Stewart asks the Scottish Government: ‘… whether the ferry service for vehicle crossings on the Cowal peninsula-Inverclyde route is operated by a private monopoly; what the operator’s gross profit margin is, and what its position is on the appropriateness of the size of the margin.’
This is a real muddle of a question. Western Ferries may operate the only vehicle and passenger ferry across the Clyde at this point – but any other operator is free to come in and compete as they wish. Not forgetting that Dunoon is not an island and locals are able to drive to Glasgow, if that is their wish.
The ferry action group could pay £2.50 to Companies House to get Western’s accounts – a cost cheaper than the taxpayer will pick up for the operation of parliamentary questions; and answers which the Scottish Government, in this case, could not answer without paying the same £2.50 itself.
The question also makes no reference to the substantial investment in the route which has been made from Western’s profits; where the state ship-owner, CMAL, presides over a fast ageing fleet; and the state ferry operator, CalMac, has to look to using its reserves to bid for services abroad in order to find a role for the redundant CMAL boats that are part of their lease agreement.
The ‘subsidy on vessels’ question
Mr Stewart asks the Scottish Government: ‘… what the annual public subsidy will be for vessels on the Gourock-Dunoon ferry route, and whether this will be offset by the enhanced berthing costs being paid to the local authorities responsible for the respective harbours’.
This question makes no sense. Public subsidy is not paid on vessels but to support operators.
‘Local authorities’ do not own ‘the respective harbours’ concerned. Argyll and Bute Council owns the Dunoon linkspan; but the Gourock facility is owned by the Scottish Government through CMAL.
Subsidy on maritime cabotage is controlled by what EU legislation permits and what it will not permit – and it does not permit such subsidy outside lifeline services. The Gourock-Dunoon route is specifically prohibited from subsidy on any vehicle service element.
The ‘off the wall’ question
Mr Stewart’s script had him ask: ‘… the Scottish Government whether Transport Scotland will put out a tender for the contract for the new roll-on/roll-off vessels on the Gourock-Dunoon ferry route; whether the vessels will be expected to meet the specifications set out in the report, Gourock-Dunoon Ferry Service: Feasibility Study of a Future Passenger and Vehicle Service with the Vehicle Portion being non-Subsidised; how much the vessels will cost, and what its position is on whether they should be rented at full-market value in order to ensure that they do not breach EU rules’.
To the best of our knowledge there are no new RORO vessels to be commissioned for the Gourock-Dunoon route – yet this question refers to ‘the new… vessels’ as if a commission is a matter of fact.
The Scottish Government could be in no position to quote a price for any vessels until a tender had been processed and a winning bid accepted – which would determine that price.
The totally doolally question
To ask the Scottish Government what its position is on whether vessels on the Gourock-Dunoon ferry route must carry vehicles in order to be considered economically viable’.
The bottom line here is that no unsubsidised vehicle ferry service on the longer and more expensive town centres route between Gourock and Dunoon can hope to wash its face in competition with the shorter, cheaper and already successful Western service. Western also owns its own terminals where berthing and passenger dues are required at both ends of the town centres route – a ‘go figure’ moment.
The fact that the business case is not there is attested to by the absence of any offers to provide such a service in the last town centres passenger service tender – where such offers were actually invited. There is also no indication of any interested bidder coming forwards from the Scottish Government’s sustained touting of such a commercial-risk service through the autumn of 2013.
With the lack of any credible business case, no commercial operator is likely to come forward – because such a service cannot make a profit; and European law prohibits a member state from subsidising a vehicle service on a non-lifeline service.
It will be interesting to see how the Transport Minister’s officials finesse his answer to this one.
The ‘put them on the back foot’ question
Mr Stewart asks: ‘… the Scottish Government on what date the Dunoon harbour breakwater and linkspan became operational; how much it cost to develop, and whether it has been used for the transport of vehicles’.
This question was designed to embarrass the Scottish Government and the local authority for Dunoon, Argyll and Bute Council. This was not the smartest move by the ferry action group when they badly need both government and council to be prepared to try a few moves to placate them.
The Scottish Government funded Argyll and Bute Council by a few million to commission the Dunoon linkspan – on spec, with no known user. Having lain unused for several years after its availability in the Spring of 2005, it has recently been used – inappropriately, for boats designed for pontoon berthing – to embark and disembark passengers on the Argyll Ferries’ service.
To date it has not been used to transport one single vehicle.
The lesson to be learned
While it is common enough practice for constituents to feed to MSPs [and to MPs] questions they are interested in having answered, the lesson to be learned from David Stewart’s discombobulation in this debacle is that self-interest, if not good practice, dictates that you know enough about the issue in question to vet the scripts. And this issue has a complex history and a fairly complex present.
We are not suggesting for one moment that the Ferry Action Group set out to make a trolley of the Highlands and Islands MSP, but his clearly un-interrogated acceptance of their scripts has left him looking pretty foolish and surprisingly under informed.
This is not how a normally capable and engaged MSP like David Stewart would wish to be seen.
Compared to other MSPs who may well be as casually helpful, Mr Stewart may have been unfortunate in assisting constituents whose own grasp of the matter in question was markedly less than secure where he may have expected the reverse. He will have learned from this and marked a few cards. Other pragmatic MSPs are advised to digest his experience and save themselves the pain of the short cut to an elephant trap.
Note: The sequel to this, in the Transport Minister’s patronising responses to the questions Mr Stewart had been given to lodge is in an article of 2nd June 2014 here: Transport Minister politely puts ill-briefed MSP back in his box and dances over the elephant traps.
