GMB: Let Ferguson's become Scotland's ferry factory
By Louise Gilmour, GMB Scotland secretary
After all the years and all the millions, it is a simple question. Is Ferguson Marine just not very good at building ferries?
Times columnist Iain McWhirter asked it again at the weekend after 70 redundancies were announced at the shipyard where the wait continues for contracts fanfared by the Scottish Government before the Holyrood election.
It is a simple question but so is the answer. In another time, and what seems like another country, Ferguson Marine was once Scotland’s ferry factory.
A third of the current 36-strong CalMac fleet was built there and built to last. Many of the passenger ships launched in Port Glasgow are still serving our island communities long after they should have sailed into the sunset.
So the relatively recent notion that Ferguson’s does not know the sharp end of a ship from the other is strictly for the birds. The last commercial shipyard on the Clyde is good at building ferries. Just not the last two.
No yard in the world could have built the Glen Rosa and Glen Sannox on time and on budget. Those calamitous contracts were certainly too big for Ferguson’s, too ill-considered, too badly planned, too “world-leading,” too much.
Responsibility can be shared among the spinning carousel of ministers, managers, civil servants and those in charge of our ferries. The workers, the actual shipbuilders who questioned the feasibility of the contracts from the very start, remain blameless.
With around 800 islands and 10,000 miles of coastline, Scotland needs ships. Is it really beyond us, this nation of world-changing engineers, to build a publicly-owned shipyard conveyor-belting small, uniformly-designed passenger ships to a publicly-owned ferry service?
Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd (CMAL), in charge of commissioning, certainly thinks so as it races to send orders to Poland, Turkey, anywhere, in fact, but here. Incredibly, despite building the first Lord of the Isles in 1989, Ferguson’s, Scotland’s own shipyard, was recently frozen out of even tendering for its replacement.
That work will also be off-shored, naturally, despite ministers insisting the potential value of contracts to Scotland – the skilled jobs and apprenticeships, the social cohesion and salaries supporting local economies – is properly considered. If warm words could sail, we wouldn’t need ferries at all.
Of course, the relentless focus on Ferguson’s has been justified by the torrent of public money sent there but it has also been a diversion from far wider and graver concerns around our lifeline ferry system.
The West Coast network is shaped by Transport Scotland, acting for the Scottish Government, CMAL, and CalMac. Is it working? Ask our islanders. Could a procurement system founded on a well-run, modernised, rejuvenated Scottish shipyard help?
More simple questions but if transport secretary Stephen Flynn has any answers, he needs to be quick.
This column first appeared in The Times, 26 August 2026
