Ewing accuses transport chief of “obfuscation”
A former Scottish Government Minister has accused Transport Scotland chief executive, Alison Irvine, of “deliberate obfuscation” in her evidence to a Holyrood committee about islanders being excluded from key quango boards.
Ms Irvine’s comments which suggested that non-executive board positions on quangos like CMAL, CalMac and HIAL, are so “complex” that “islanders” would need “mentoring and training” to make them “board ready” have provoked widespread anger and ridicule.
The £135,000 a year civil servant also claimed that Transport Scotland “put an appropriate emphasis on community voice … but have as yet been unsuccessful”. Now, In response, former SNP minister, Fergus Ewing, has directly challenged this assertion.
He said Ms Irvine should “come clean and admit that in the last CMAL board appointment process, there was a quite deliberate refusal to stipulate that islanders would be given any preferred consideration at all - or to use the Government jargon that ‘lived experience’ was essential”.
That appointment round resulted in a Yorkshire railway consultant, Mark Tarry, being preferred for CMAL board membership but he resigned within a year. Mr Ewing had already written to First Minister, John Swinney, challenging the failure to use a ‘lived experience’ criterion in relevant board appointments.
This week, Mr Ewing said: “This failure is despite the fact that the powers do exist and have been used elsewhere in quangoland. Other public appointments have specified the importance of local knowledge and experience.
“Ms Irvine therefore wholly failed to disclose to the Committee that the criteria for the board appointments under discussion were set in a way that gave no such consideration to islanders. Yet she could have done just that herself, since coming into the post in 2024.
“She will have known fine well that she could have set, or indeed MInisters could have forced her to set, island residence or experience among the criteria. It is important that this apparently deliberate obfuscation should not go without comment”.
Holyrood’s Transport Committee was questioning specifically the fact that no resident of the Highlands and Islands has been appointed to the board of Highlands and Islands Airports Limited for at least a decade, when Ms Irvine offered her offensive generalisation about “islanders”. Mr Ewing said: “I fear the truth may be that the top civil servants are intent on retaining their iron grip on quango appointments, knowing that their Ministers, often pliant and docile, will do nothing. Ministers may not even realise that they are in fact the masters and their officials the servants”.
Meanwhile, Murdo Maclennan – one of the few islanders to make it through the quango barrier before being dropped from the board of CMAL after defending island interests – has written to this week’s Gazette, stating that the attitudes he experienced reflected “an overbearing mindset of superiority”.
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