Paul Sweeney MSP has criticised the Scottish Government’s approach to public shipbuilding procurement, warning that continued delays and caution are creating a looming gap in work for Scottish yards, including the publicly owned Ferguson Marine facility in Port Glasgow.
Speaking in response to UK Defence Journal reporting on delays to the Marine Vessel Replacement Project, Sweeney said the Scottish Government had failed to place a new vessel order with a Scottish yard for more than a decade, despite owning a shipyard outright.
“The Scottish Government have failed to purchase a new vessel with a Scottish shipyard in over a decade. Despite owning a shipyard in Port Glasgow, there clearly is no joined-up strategy on public procurement in any meaningful way that is building a shipbuilding industry in Scotland,” he said.
The comments follow confirmation that plans to replace the Marine Protection Vessel Minna and Marine Research Vessel Scotia have been pushed back beyond earlier expectations. Although a Prior Information Notice published in June 2025 indicated that a contract notice could be issued by September, no procurement stage followed, and the Scottish Government later amended the notice to state that it was not in a position to progress further and that no dates were available.
Sweeney argued that procurement policy was being driven by legal risk aversion rather than industrial strategy.
“It seems to be a government run by risk-averse procurement lawyers rather than anyone with any knowledge of how to build an industrial base and develop value and wealth in Scotland,” he said, adding that other countries routinely use public sector shipbuilding pipelines to sustain national industrial capacity.
He also criticised the Scottish Government’s refusal to consider applying exemptions under the Subsidy Control Act 2022 to enable a direct award, calling it “another example of their unwillingness to deliver policy in the national industrial interest.”
The intervention comes amid growing concern over future workloads at Ferguson Marine. Sweeney warned that the yard faces a potential crunch in activity this year unless additional work is secured, noting that even if a ferry contract such as the proposed Lord of the Isles replacement were directly awarded, mobilisation would not occur until next year.
“There is going to be a crunch in work,” he said. “The only thing really staving off redundancies at the moment is the most recent delay to Glen Rosa.”
While fabrication work linked to the Type 26 frigate programme is expected to provide some steelwork activity, Sweeney cautioned that this would not cover all trades at the yard.
“There is going to be a significant challenge for outfit trades if there is not more shipbuilding work flowing through the yard in an end-to-end sense,” he said.
Sweeney called on the Scottish Government to fully capitalise Ferguson Marine in line with First Marine International guidance, to establish a consistent pipeline of Scottish Government shipbuilding orders, and to use the Scottish National Investment Bank to support refund guarantees and patient finance for export work.
“Without that,” he said, “the whole thing has been nothing more than a superficial fig leaf to avoid the embarrassment of Ferguson Marine collapsing altogether.”
The Scottish Government has previously stated that replacement vessels for Minna and Scotia are merchant-class assets subject to civilian procurement rules, and that any future competition must comply with procurement and subsidy control legislation. At present, no timetable has been set for issuing a tender or awarding a contract for the vessels.
Counting down the seconds until the SNP blame it on England…