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What you said is encouraging, but it took us back to an individual project that has been successful and made itself sustainable. Those exist throughout different communities, but we do not yet have a template for town centre regeneration that we can roll out town by town. Local communities are all different, and projects have to be tailored to each one, but it all comes back to money and to making them sustainable. There is no point in putting nice shiny buildings in place if they will have to be subsidised—at vast expense—for years to come; they have to become sustainable. That is one of the key things that I have not seen come out of the evidence that we have so far. Individual projects have made themselves sustainable, but regenerating town centres by refurbishing shops and apartments above them is a very different beast.

I want to move on to the second important issue, which is money. At the end of the day, the whole thing comes down to money, its availability and whether, through the wealth of our country, we can generate the ability to carry out regeneration.

We have been shown many examples from across Scotland of individual projects that are viable, thriving and delivering to their communities. However, we have not seen a single all-encompassing regeneration of a town centre in all our work. The parts that we have seen in places such as Dumfries are very capital intensive, and that capital has to come from somewhere. There is an assumption that some money will come from the private sector, and there seems to be an assumption among many community groups that, ultimately, money will come from the Scottish Government and/or councils, which is a wee bit optimistic when we see the amount of money that will have to be made available.

Let us suppose that, somehow, we can get the money together to start major regeneration projects in towns across Scotland. Regeneration projects seem to thrive much more in communities that are reasonably well heeled and have disposable income than they do in communities where there is less disposable income. If we invest in a wealthier community, it seems that there is a higher propensity for the project to succeed. If a project is in a more vulnerable area where there are fewer resources available and where people have less disposable income, it will be much more difficult to sustain in the short to medium term, at least.

How do we make regeneration viable and sustainable? We are particularly keen for redevelopment in our less well-off communities. They are the ones that need it most, yet they might not have the resources within them to sustain regeneration in, as I say, the short to medium term, at least. How do we make it sustainable and put in place plans to make it happen? Over and above the capital, is the Government prepared to provide additional resources year on year to keep projects ticking over?

Did the fact that there was no formal escalation process contribute to the failure? I have said that the programme steering group did not seem to have a clear role, and when issues were raised, Transport Scotland passed them up the line to Scottish ministers on an ad hoc basis.

In the Auditor General’s report, it says that ministers were advised on an “ad hoc” basis.

Did they work?

It seems that there was some conflict in the information that CMAL and FMEL were producing—one was rather more optimistic than the other. How were the issues dealt with when they were escalated up the line to the PSG, Transport Scotland and so on? What interventions were made to try to resolve what had become a contract dispute?

Given the different claims that were being made, it is clear that dispute management or resolution—whatever we want to call it—should have been used. I think that there was an option for that in the contract, but it was never exercised. Why?

That sounds a bit odd to me, but let us move to the interesting stuff: the money. The Scottish Government gave loan support to FMEL outside of the payments under the contract. What was the rationale for and purpose of those loans? Were any conditions of note attached to the loans? If so, were they adhered to? How was the success or otherwise of the loans assessed?

Yet, at the point of nationalisation, there was no sign of any results from that money—not just the loans, but the staged payments. The Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee’s report “Construction and procurement of ferry vessels in Scotland” makes it clear that those staged payments seemed odd, because some were done out of sequence just in order to hit a target, but bore no relation to the progression that should have been in place for constructing those vessels. That is more than evident from their state when nationalisation took place. Given the concerns that were raised by that committee, what happened at nationalisation? You took over hugely incomplete vessels—a few million pounds of steel here and there—but £128.25 million in total has been poured into the yard, and there is nothing to show for it.

Did the nationalisation allow you to take over the historical books of FMEL?