Why CalMac will only keep heading for the rocks under SNP

I wish Robbie Drummond, former chief executive of Caledonian MacBrayne, well in his new post as finance director of the McGill bus company. He is a perfectly competent executive who was thrown into an impossible situation.

Running a ferry company without enough ferries was bound to be tricky for someone qualified as a chartered accountant rather than a magician. Being left to firefight alone, with an absentee board and a procession of ministers in hiding, made it impossible. I suspect he was glad to see the back of it.

Let us imagine, heaven forefend, that the Scottish Government owned a bus company and constituted it along the same lines as Caledonian MacBrayne. Let’s call it Hyslop Transport though, over the past decade, it would have been Mackay Transport, Yousaf Transport, Gilruth Transport and half a dozen others easily forgotten.

The first essential would be to appoint a chairman who lives in Denmark and is seldom seen in Scotland. He would be supported by a ministerially approved board, none of whom resides within a hundred miles of the bus routes and has little intention of visiting them.

No one held accountable

A precondition of appointment, apart from not knowing the front end of a bus from the rear, would be that they hold, or anticipate, other Scottish Government quango sinecures. These are distributed on condition of serial beneficiaries never opening their mouths, in the unlikely event of them having anything to say. 

But who will supply the buses? It is a first principle that Hyslop Transport must have nothing to do with their design or commissioning. That will be the responsibility of another Scottish Government quango. The buses will arrive seven years late at quadruple the original price. And, of course, nobody will be held accountable.

It is unlikely Robbie Drummond would have applied for a job at Hyslop Transport since he has seen it all before. My imagining of it may read like a parody but is actually a startlingly close analogy with how CalMac is run and, on current form, will continue to be run.  The unchanging mantra of the Hyslop Transport board is: “Learn nothing and retain power.”

‘A sense of remoteness’

This week, Transport Scotland – a famously arrogant and incompetent branch of the Scottish Government – published its “analysis” of a consultation undertaken in CalMac communities. Amidst warm words about “increasing engagement”, it became clear that nothing is intended to change about governance of CalMac or the procurement quango, CMAL.

These aspirations were dealt with in one brief reference to “a concern that the lack of representation of island residents on the boards of CalMac and CMAL has contributed to a sense of remoteness between these bodies and the communities they serve”. The “reforms” suggested by Transport Scotland then ignored these perceptions. 

CalMac has a “Ferry Communities Board” with no statutory powers and the preferred ploy is to talk up this classic corporate sop. As the chairman of the Western Isles Council’s transport committee, Uisdean Robertson, said: “This will leave the same people from CalMac round the same table with the same people from Transport Scotland, so in terms of local input or accountability, nothing changes.”

Two essential reforms

The question for Fiona Hyslop as Transport Secretary is whether she will be led by her civil servants down this course of least resistance. Decisions need to be made soon about future governance of the ferries sector and if nothing changes at the top, then be certain that the follies of the recent past will be repeated in the future.

Two basic reforms are essential. The first is for meaningful devolution of management decision-making. It is a matter of historical accident that a sprawling bureaucracy runs CalMac from Gourock, at a safe distance from operational issues. On grounds of job dispersal alone, any government genuinely interested in Scotland’s periphery would see an opportunity rather than a threat.

The second issue which Transport Scotland has a huge vested interest in evading is the absence of any democratic input whatsoever. A couple of years ago, the Scottish Government kicked things into touch by commissioning a report from Ernst and Young on how other countries run their ferry services. Needless to say, every inconvenient lesson has been dismissed.

Order of Canada

They looked at Norway and New Zealand (heavily devolved to local levels) and British Columbia which has perhaps the most similar set-up to CalMac. There, BC Ferries have a 60-year contract, almost total commercial freedom including, crucially, the right to order its own vessels. The board is chaired by a distinguished public servant who was awarded the Order of Canada for her “tireless advocacy of under-served and marginalised communities”.

Unfortunately, Joyce MacPhail – good Scottish name – is exactly the kind of person the Scottish Government’s quango system moves heaven and earth to exclude in case they proved to be nuisances. 

It seems that nowhere else in the world runs its ferry services without active involvement of communities dependent upon them. Yet here not even the extreme failures of recent years look like leading to that democratic deficit being addressed.

Repair costs have doubled

As I write, Islay has a half-service due to the 38-year-old vessel Hebridean Isles breaking down. Arran sailings are cancelled “due to technical issues”. This week, a Freedom of Information request revealed that CalMac repair costs doubled last year as they struggled to maintain an absurdly elderly fleet. 

Arrival of new ferries from Turkey will bring relief but if Ms Hyslop thinks that absolves her from political decisions, she is mistaken. Until “our islands”, as Edinburgh ministers love to call them, stop being treated as colonial outposts, history will repeat itself as costly farce – while fragile places pay the bitter price of continuing decline.

Just for once, Fiona Hyslop, do something radical. The status quo is a financial and democratic disaster. Do you really think islanders would have done worse?