McColl ‘frustrated’ by ferry design changes
On Good Morning Scotland, McColl says more work should have been done on the vessel’s design before the contract was tendered.
We have incurred significantly higher costs in the work we’ve had to do on these ferries, and we’ve been engaging with CMAL to discuss these costs. Maybe the best way to put it is that we’ve been frustrated in these discussions. We’ve been discussing it for over a year, and we have been funding that, so it’s been using a lot of our capital. We’ve been funding it solely. Our view is that these have been genuine changes that have had to be made to the work we’ve been doing, and they’re changes that ought to be incurred by the buyer. I believe that perhaps more design development work could have been done prior to the invitation to tender going out, rather than dealing with multiple things that are arising as we got into the build process. But we’re working diligently through that.
McColl also told the programme that Ferguson Marine had been extensively refurbished to prepare it for new Royal Navy and commercial contracts.
