Ferguson Marine Loses Skilled Trades While Ministers Stall On Ship Deal

Ferguson Marine now has just seven platers and 11 welders left on its books, four months after Scottish ministers promised the state-owned shipyard four new ship contracts. Not one of those contracts has been signed. The GMB union says the Port Glasgow yard is losing skilled tradespeople faster than government lawyers can finish checking the paperwork.

The Scottish government insists it is completing due diligence on subsidy control and competition law before signing anything. Every week that review runs costs the yard workers it cannot quickly replace, and the clock has already run past May’s Holyrood election, the vote the contracts were meant to help secure.

Four Ships, Zero Signatures Since March

The Scottish government announced in March it would directly award contracts for four vessels to Ferguson Marine: a fisheries research vessel, a marine protection ship and two small CalMac ferries. Then economy secretary and deputy first minister Kate Forbes told MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament) the deal would unlock up to £14.2 million (about $18m) to modernise the yard.

The four vessels break down like this.

• Fisheries research vessel – a replacement for the Scotia, a research ship Ferguson’s built decades ago under previous ownership.
• Marine protection vessel – a replacement for the Minna, a fisheries protection ship also built at the yard.
• Sound of Harris – one of two small CalMac ferries under phase two of the Small Vessel Replacement Programme.
• Sound of Barra – the second ferry in that pair, built for heavier seas than the phase one vessels.

Ferguson Marine’s chief executive, Graeme Thomson, called the promise “a watershed moment” for the firm. He said the yard was working with government stakeholders “to map out the detailed technical requirements, timelines, and legal frameworks to get these projects underway smoothly.”

The Silence Since May’s Election

GMB Scotland, one of the UK’s largest trade unions, welcomed the March pledge as it landed. The union’s own statement at the time said the deal would let the yard fulfil its potential as one of Scotland’s key industrial assets.

The mood has since soured. More than two months have now passed since the election, GMB says, without a single contract confirmed. Louise Gilmour, the union’s Scotland secretary, delivered a blunt verdict this month.

Ministers were loud enough in March when promising support for Ferguson Marine but, four months later, have absolutely nothing to say.

Gilmour said the contracts were “fanfared” right before an election campaign, and that “weeks are turning into months without news or apparent progress.” Ferguson’s, she said, does not have “the luxury of time to allow more boxes to be ticked at Holyrood.”

Governmental responsibility for the yard now sits with Stephen Flynn, the newly appointed economy and transport secretary. He met GMB shop stewards and local MSP Stuart McMillan last week, but no concrete assurances followed.

A Scottish government spokesperson said ministers are “working at pace to progress the necessary due diligence, legal, commercial and subsidy control assessments” needed to support the four direct awards, adding that taxpayers would expect the checks to be “thorough and comprehensive.”

Why Can’t Ministers Just Award The Contracts?

Because Ferguson Marine is wholly owned by the Scottish government, handing it work without a competitive tender risks breaching UK subsidy control law, which treats shipbuilding as a sensitive sector. Ministers rejected an almost identical direct award on those exact grounds two years ago, and are now testing whether the legal ground has genuinely shifted.

In 2024, then transport secretary Fiona Hyslop rejected a direct award to Ferguson’s for seven small ferries under phase one of the Small Vessel Replacement Programme (SVRP).

“Shipbuilding is a competitive global market and a designated sensitive sector under the UK Subsidy Control Act,” she said. “For SVRP, it was assessed that a substantial subsidy would have been required to support direct award of the Phase 1 contract to Fergusons, which we did not consider would be capable of being justified.”

Those seven ferries went to a Polish yard instead, for £160 million. Forbes herself had called a direct award too risky as recently as July 2024, citing “substantial risks and uncertainties” under subsidy law. By March 2026, nine weeks before the Holyrood election, she had reversed course entirely.

Forbes told parliament the four vessels would form the core of the yard’s workload for five years while still allowing other commercial work. But evidence Ferguson Marine itself gave to MSPs suggested the same direct awards could restrict the yard’s ability to chase other contracts, tying its one lifeline to a single legal condition.

Money already promised has not moved much faster. A cross-party Holyrood public audit committee heard last December that just £570,000 of the £14.2 million in capital funding pledged for the yard had actually been spent, about 4% of the total.

Richard Leonard, the committee’s convenor, said “the yard simply cannot modernise on the basis of a perpetually pending plan.” Gilmour told the same debate the yard was being “sabotaged” by inaction, adding that ministers “from First Minister John Swinney down” had offered only excuses.

Where The Skilled Trades Went

Ferguson Marine’s headcount has been falling for years, long before this latest standoff. The trend line tells its own story.

A government filing from 2022 logged 383 permanent staff, 73 agency workers and six interim hires, alongside £89.4 million already spent on the two ferries by that point. By September 2023, reporting found the workforce had fallen to a similar level as when it was saved by the government in 2019.

The core shipbuilding trades have thinned the most. The yard now directly employs just seven platers and 11 welders, with little left for the traditional “black squad” metalworking trades that once defined it. Subcontracting work for BAE Systems, building steel units for Royal Navy Type 26 frigates under construction at Govan, has also dried up. That contract is complete, and no repeat order has been agreed.

MV Glen Rosa was named at its 2024 launch ceremony by Beth Atkinson, then an apprentice welder at the yard. She has since moved to another shipbuilder. Union reps say newly qualified apprentices often follow her, leaving for BAE Systems, where they see a clearer career path.

Fergusons Has Lost This Fight Before

Ministers reversing themselves on Ferguson Marine is not new. The yard’s history is full of near misses.

1. 2014: Businessman Jim McColl, a friend and adviser to former First Minister Alex Salmond, rescues the yard from collapse weeks before the independence referendum.
2. 2015: Ferguson’s wins a £97 million contract to build Glen Sannox and Glen Rosa, the first LNG-fuelled ferries built in the UK.
3. 2019: The yard collapses into administration again and is nationalised by the Scottish government.
4. 2024: Ministers reject a direct award of seven small ferries; the contract goes to a Polish yard, and Glen Sannox is delivered more than six years late.
5. March 2026: The government reverses course again, promising four new vessels directly to Ferguson’s.

At the time of the 2014 rescue, the yard employed just 76 staff in ageing facilities, a fraction of the workforce it would carry at its post-nationalisation peak. Critics have long questioned whether two 100-metre, first-of-their-kind LNG ferries were ever the right project for a yard that size.

The yard’s roots run deeper than any of that. Ferguson Shipbuilders formed in 1903, and the site has delivered some 360 ships over more than two centuries, moving between private and public ownership several times, including a stretch inside British Shipbuilders from 1977. Hiring has swung wildly too: a 2021 recruitment drive brought in a record number of apprentices in a single year, part of a post-nationalisation push that today’s much smaller yard has not repeated.

A BBC documentary, The Great Ferries Scandal, later presented evidence that the original 2015 procurement had been rigged by employees of Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd (CMAL), the government’s ferry-procurement agency, though CMAL disputes the claim. Other explanations for the delays include an unrealistic specification, immature design work before contracts were signed, management failures during construction, and disruption from the Covid pandemic.

The pattern repeated within weeks of March’s promise. Transport minister Fiona Hyslop announced the next CalMac order, a replacement for the ageing Lord of the Isles, would go to open competitive tender rather than a direct award. CMAL began that procurement the following month with pre-qualification conditions that, in effect, blocked Ferguson’s or any other UK-based shipyard from bidding.

The Next Deadline Is Glen Rosa’s

While ministers weigh the new contracts, the yard’s most pressing job is the one it already has. MV Glen Rosa returned to Port Glasgow last week after a dry-docking at Greenock, the last big physical milestone before sea trials.

The ferry’s delivery has already slipped once this year, after inspectors found corrosion in the vessel’s stern tubes and deterioration of the hull coating during an earlier dry-docking. Delivery is now due in the fourth quarter of 2026, nearly eight years after the ferry was first promised.

“We deeply regret having to announce a further delay in the delivery of Glen Rosa,” Thomson said, adding that the project remains complex but that the team is “fully committed to doing everything we can to bring forward delivery.”

Glen Rosa’s cost, including contingency, has reportedly reached £197.5 million, roughly four times its original £50 million contract. Combined with Glen Sannox, delivered in November 2024 more than six years late, the two ferries’ total bill, including pre-nationalisation costs and written-off government loans, is estimated at around £500 million.

None of that timeline moves faster because ministers sign the new contracts tomorrow. Gilmour’s own arithmetic makes the point: even a signature today buys at least another year before any steel gets cut, because design work has to come first. The seven platers still on Ferguson Marine’s payroll do not have new contracts to show for the wait.