Scottish politician and former shipbuilder Paul Sweeney has criticised the decision to select a Chinese shipyard as the preferred bidder for two new Northern Isles freight vessels, arguing it reflects deeper issues in procurement policy and industrial strategy.
The comments follow confirmation that Caledonian Maritime Assets Limited (CMAL) has identified Guangzhou Shipyard International as the lead bidder for the contract, with final award expected after a standstill period, the UK Defence Journal understands.
Sweeney said he had raised the issue repeatedly, focusing on how procurement rules are applied. “Under procurement exercises, the Scottish Government is capable of excluding non treaty state suppliers… including China… particularly where there’s strong evidence of significant subsidies which give their shipyards unfair advantage over ours,” he said.
He pointed to pricing disparities as evidence of market distortion. “It’s quite clear from certain examples where Chinese tenders are coming in below the material costs of European UK ship building companies, that there are significant unfair subsidies at play in Chinese shipbuilding,” he said, adding that China’s long-term industrial strategy has enabled it to dominate the sector over the past two decades.
Sweeney contrasted this with what he described as a lack of coordinated policy in the UK. “We seem to not have the same level of sophisticated industrial policy in this country, which is deeply frustrating… yet there is still massive leakage of these orders out of that cross government shipbuilding pipeline to overseas shipyards, which is completely outrageous and unacceptable and should not be happening full stop.”
He said the vessels could have provided an opportunity for domestic yards. “These two vessels would have been a perfect opportunity for Harland and Wolff in Belfast,” he said, adding that interest from other UK yards had been constrained by short tender timelines and limited confidence in the process. “Some British shipyards just don’t think it’s worth the expense time to submit bids… because the competition is so obviously going to favour heavily subsidised foreign shipyards.”
Sweeney also outlined how a more coordinated approach could have supported domestic industry, including a distributed build model across multiple UK sites. “With a bit of joined up thinking about industrial strategy… we could use this demand signal intelligently to seed the industry and create volume through our shipbuilding sites. It creates a virtuous cycle,” he said.
He argued that current procurement practices risk reinforcing the opposite effect. “It just feels that we’re currently locked in a vicious cycle in terms of laissez faire procurement that favours, inevitably, overseas yards, which do have the backing of their governments,” he said.
Sweeney added that, while recent domestic awards for smaller vessels are welcome, larger projects remain critical to rebuilding capacity. “It’s just very tragic that yet another critical opportunity has gone into overseas hands, and it’s just not a sustainable approach if we’re hoping to develop an industrial base in the shipbuilding industry in this country,” he said.
