Ferries may be a problem, but could be sunk in the hands of Westminster

Sir, – With reference to the frequent letters bemoaning the island ferry defects and lack of capacity, I concur that the state of the ferries is not good. However, don’t use them to knock the Scottish Government and tacitly imply they would happily be better served under the UK Government.

I provide the following list of current UK projects that are unfortunately over budget and behind schedule. It is not exhaustive, there are more.

The UK Government paid £50 million for Brexit ferries that were never built. Ferry prices in the rest of the UK are less that half those of Scotland.

CalMac’s recent events, which have caused in-car sleepovers, received a lot of TV and radio airtime but criticisms in the Shetland Times of North-Link’s Lerwick to Aberdeen run by Serco, having insufficient accommodation or capacity for the overnight trip, have not seen anything like the same coverage. Road equivalent tariff (RET) has increased demand massively, which is great, but it has its downsides with more people and motorhomes, but these are good problems to have.

The test and trace system in the UK cost £37 billion, an eye-watering amount.

In Germany it cost £48 million, and scrutiny of where the money went has been difficult to determine.

The test and trace phone app, used in Scotland, cost around £400,000 to develop which was even cheaper than the one developed by Ireland at £789,000 – deployed six months ahead of England’s phone app.

The UK defence programmes are showing weak project control. Two aircraft carriers were built and do not have the aircraft needed. The Army’s Ajax project, for armoured vehicles, tanks and the like, is five years behind and 50% over the original budget of £3.3bn – and they are not fit for use.

The HS2 is sitting at £120bn, massively over budget, and isn’t going anywhere north of Manchester; however, the existing line to Leeds will be upgraded. It’s not coming anywhere close to us up here.

Crossrail, a Londonspecific project, is five years late and again significantly over budget by £4bn.

So while the current ferries situation is not good, I wouldn’t trust the UK to run Scotland’s ferries

Ferguson Marine is now in good shape for the future, after the massive investment by the Scottish Government.