Latest news with #GuyStenhouse
The Herald Scotland
17 hours ago
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Public sector workers who refuse to come into office should be sacked
For some reason this service, covering something as basic as food, is no problem at all for the private sector to deliver. Yet if there is any suggestion of the private sector being involved in providing things like universal healthcare or education there is mass hysteria and the First Minister has to make a reassuring statement in Parliament that those nasty private sector people will be kept out. Read more Guy Stenhouse This even extends, rather daftly, to the provision of ferry services. Just how much evidence do we need that the private sector can deliver ferry services better than the public sector. CalMac has the wrong sort of ferries, travelling in some cases on the wrong routes, too slowly, too unreliably, too infrequently at far too much cost. Yes, you meet some wonderful staff on a CalMac vessel but that isn't good enough. The service is poor and costs too much. Unusually, ferries provide a laboratory quality example of a private sector operator providing a superior and more cost-effective service compared with the state-owned operator. CalMac used to have a monopoly on the Gourock to Dunoon route. Then along came the privately owned Western Ferries; no catering, smaller vessels, fewer crew, more frequent sailings for longer hours each day. The public voted with their feet. Western Ferries, despite attempts at unfair competition by CalMac, flourished. So much so that CalMac gave up the route. Western Ferries continues to provide an excellent service today. Given the chance they and others like them could do the same on other routes but the Scottish Government won't entertain it. This is madness, the poor service from CalMac is not what people on our islands need and its crazy cost is not fair to taxpayers. Education. In England they allow academy schools run on private sector lines with their own board of Governors but within an effective regulatory framework to provide education. It works. England used to be behind Scotland on things like reading attainment and maths but now it is the other way around, Scotland trails. Have we looked south to see what we could learn? We have not. Would private firms be better than CalMac at delivering ferry services? (Image: free) The NHS is doomed to failure. Each dollop of extra money at best moves the situation temporarily from one of imminent failure to merely crisis. The demand for healthcare, and add to that adult social care, is almost limitless. The population who need help grows, the population who can give that help and pay for it diminishes, the overall cake is not growing so if we spend more on health and social care we have less to spend on other things. The economy already groans under the weight of taxation and debt. We need bravery, leadership and a willingness to take radical action if we are going to be able to rescue our health and social care services. In England there is some evidence the Government understands just shovelling in more and more money to the NHS is simply not sustainable. Reform is absolutely necessary. In Scotland we celebrate that we pay our healthcare workers more than in England but there is no debate about radical reform, we still believe more money and state control of everything is the solution when it clearly is not. Democratic control of the regulatory framework, the setting of standards and priorities is absolutely vital but why is it that we just cannot stomach the private sector delivering healthcare? The private sector will expect to make a profit but what if in return they bring additional financial resources which revolutionise the technical capability of our hospitals; if they can treat, to a high standard, 5 people instead of 3 people for the same money as now, what exactly is the problem with that? Read more The state is not good at actually delivering things well and efficiently. We all make increasing demands of public services. Our public debt is too high and still rising. If we don't do something new the wheels will soon come off. Yes, the Government should work hard boosting growth but that is the relatively easy bit. The harder, but even more vital, part of their work should be on increasing efficiency so that public money goes further. Public servants who go on strike because they are asked to come into the office for at least two days a week should be replaced as not fit for the job. Unions who won't talk about ending unsustainable, gold-plated public-sector pension scheme should be faced down. The relentless rise in the number of civil servants must not just be stopped but reversed. The list is endless, hard, grinding, relentless focus on delivering more with less. This is what the private sector does every day. Sticking our heads in the sand and confusing the state doing more with actual progress is the road to ruin. In Scotland we are well down that road. Guy Stenhouse is a notable figure in the Scottish financial sector. He has held various positions, including being the Managing Director of Noble Grossart, an independent merchant bank based in Edinburgh, until 2017
The Herald Scotland
17-05-2025
- The Herald Scotland
Scottish Government ferries decision is a disaster for our islands
This is a cowardly disgrace and a disaster for our island communities. This is not the fault of those who work at CalMac, it is the fault of the owner of Caledonian Maritime Assets Limited ("CMAL") which owns most of the vessels and the owner of CalMac which operates them. In both cases the owner is the Scottish Government. 100 per cent. For many years. There are no excuses. The CalMac fleet essentially divides into two. First, a number of small vessels which ply the shorter more sheltered routes like Largs to Cumbrae or Portavadie to Tarbert. They shuttle back and forth sometimes singly and sometimes in pairs. They are getting a bit long in the tooth so they do break down rather too often but in general they are fit for purpose. They have a small crew who do not live aboard. They all run on fossil fuels. Read more Guy Stenhouse The Scottish Government has recently ordered replacements for some of these vessels from a Polish yard. As part of the Scottish Government's dedication to virtue signalling these new vessels will be electric. This will require infrastructure investments at every port to enable large amounts of electricity to be rapidly fed into each ship's batteries. Can anybody see the potential for a huge screw up in a few years time? What can possibly go wrong? The real problem is with the larger vessels which go to such places as Arran and Lewis and Harris. The new vessels which are coming into service are very large. The Glen Sannox, which is intended to ply mainly the Ayrshire to Arran route, which takes around an hour, is about 7,000 tons. To put that into context, a World War Two Atlantic Convoy Corvette escort ship weighed about 1,000 tons. A ferry needs to be bigger because it has to carry passengers and vehicles but the comparison shows that vessels as big as the Glen Sannox are not needed for weather related reasons when going to Arran. In fact when coming into port a large monohull ship like the Glen Sannox is more difficult to berth than a smaller multihull vessel which does not catch the wind so much. CalMac's big ships have crew which live onboard so part of the reason they are so big is that they have several decks of crew accommodation. In the case of Glen Sannox the crew is around 38. The large size of the Glen Sannox and the Scottish Government's utter failure, despite having years to get it right, to ensure the changes necessary are made to the port at Ardrossan to accommodate it, means it currently has to run from Troon which is a longer route and less convenient for users. This is not progress. What the Arran route needs is smaller ships with smaller crews running more frequently from Ardrossan. Read more If you want to read accounts with unrivalled levels of guff gathered together in their pages might I suggest those of CMAL or CalMac. The latest versions currently available are for the year to March 2024, a period before Glen Sannox, its sister ship or any of the other new larger ships from Turkey have arrived. The accounts are rather interesting. You learn that a pension scheme which is explicitly described as "generous" is offered to employees. The employer currently pays 31 per cent of salaries a year into it. How nice. You learn there are now 100 trained mental first aiders amongst the employees. You learn that around 1,000 of CalMac's "Sea Going" employees are supplied through a Gurnsey based company. The simple but unstated reasons for the latter is tax avoidance. If you look through the accounting cleverness it is clear that the vast majority, about £200 million, of CalMac's annual income comes from Government subsidy. This is a lot of money and will go up as the new ferries come into service. CalMac's accounts say that the Company has a purpose "To navigate the waters, ensuring life thrives, wherever we are". I wonder what focus group thought that one up. How about replacing it with "To provide rapid, reliable and regular ferry services which meet our customers' needs in a cost-effective manner". Our ferry services are costly, inefficient and ineffective. CalMac's monopoly, far from being extended, should have been ended. Each route should be put out to tender separately with the communities being served having a decisive say in what service is provided by what company as well as driving down costs. Yet again the Scottish Government has funked a difficult decision. Who pays the ferryman? We all do. It is time for change. Guy Stenhouse is a notable figure in the Scottish financial sector. He has held various positions, including being the Managing Director of Noble Grossart, an independent merchant bank based in Edinburgh, until 2017
