Ferries expert laments a public finance waste

​Roy Pedersen, a former HIDB and HIE official who has written widely on ferries, was for a time a Scottish Government adviser and has advocated the use of catamarans as well as the break-up of CalMac.

In his submission, Mr Pedersen calls for adoption of the “Norwegian model”, based on shortest feasible sea crossings using ferries with minimal “live-ashore” crewing and high frequency schedules.

He condemns the “appallingly poor productivity of CalMac/CMAL” and criticises “inconvenient schedules, limited capacity and unreliability, combined with very high levels of public subsidy”.

Mr Pedersen claims his alternative approach would result in “greatly improved connectivity to enable our island and peninsular communities to flourish, while freeing up around £100 million of precious taxpayer funds to support Scotland’s struggling public services”.

He adds: “Failure to grasp this opportunity will inevitably result in ever more public money being poured into a dysfunctional system while our island communities’ decline.

“Persisting with the manifestly dysfunctional policy of the state procuring large, inefficient ships, manned by large live-aboard crew complements, operating on longer routes than necessary, running to overly complex labour-intensive terminals, will increase the already high financial cost to the Scottish taxpayer.

“This will reduce funding that could otherwise go to financially strapped health and education services while diminishing the well-being of the island communities served”.

Recalling how the current set-up evolved, Mr Pedersen refers to Western Ferries who were “driven off” the Islay route “with heavily subsidised predatory pricing” while their Cowal service became “Scotland’s busiest internal ferry route, in the end seeing off the CalMac competition, by virtue of vastly superior productivity”.

On the Ferguson debacle, he estimates the costs including terminal modifications will reach “not far short of half a billion pounds”, adding: “There seems little doubt that entrusting design to CMAL in this and other cases has been improvident, particularly as opportunities have been missed along the way to secure far more cost-effective solutions”.

Mr Pedersen claims that “even before the first steel was cut, it was pointed out to officials by the independent members of the then Expert Ferry Group that these ships were ill-suited to the stations to which they were to be allocated.

“Glen Rosa’s specified capacity for 1000 passengers (now reduced to 852) and 34 crew for the then intended Little Minch services, on which no sailing has ever exceeded 312 passengers, would occasion incredulity, were it not actually envisaged”. Plans to use the vessel on Little Minch routes have now been abandoned.

Of the four ferries being built in Turkey, he writes: “New vessels will of course be welcome in so far as they will augment the failing CalMac fleet, but how much more satisfactory it would have been if efficient catamarans had been in the mix at a fraction of the capital and operating cost”.