Lies, Damned Lies and Labour

In the stunningly beautiful Western Isles six brand new schools have recently been completed or are nearing completion, including a replacement building for the famous Nicolson Institute. All six are due to accept pupils by the start of the new academic year in October 2012.

The outgoing council was responsible for the commissioning of the schools and senior members have begun quoting the concurrent completion of all six schools as a triumph in their re-election literature. The schools building programme has become highly controversial, however, due to the decision to build all six schools in parallel. Here is what happened.

Soon after the SNP Government was elected in 2007, the SNP group of councillors in the Western isles contacted the Scottish Government and asked if it would be permissible to stage the school programme over 4 or 5 years, effectively building one school at a time, with some overlap. This was to permit individual contracts to be let for each school, thus allowing local building firms to form consortia and bid for the work. The staging would also have allowed the time for dozens of modern apprenticeships to be completed as part of the programme.

The Government replied that they would have no objection to this plan, and actively encouraged it. Apart from anything else, it eased the cash flow on a project costing many tens of millions of pounds. As Donald Manford, leader of the SNP group described it, “John Swinney practically bit my hand off when I suggested staging the building programme”.

The SNP group then advised the Chief Executive who passed the advice on to all councillors. However, when the vote eventually came to approve the building programme it was now in the form of a single contract for all six schools to be built in parallel. This effectively guaranteed that no local businesses could hope to bid for the work, and that no apprenticeships would be completed under the contract.

The SNP group responded by tabling an amendment which would have split off a single school, Balvannich, and suspended the rest of the programme. This was a last ditch attempt to phase the developments, but it was voted down by all the non-SNP councillors, 27 to 4, and the single contract option was approved. FMP, a firm from Northern Ireland, won the bid and brought their own people across to carry out most of the work.

Not a single apprenticeship was created by the project and over £50 million of project spending was made off island, from a total budget of £80 million. Several long-established island building firms went bust and over 70 local tradesmen were registered with the local JobCentre Plus (There are 90 Irish contractors on the project). The larger of the surviving local contractors started chasing smaller projects, forcing the smaller businesses down market in turn, and squeezing the self employed tradesmen out of the market completely.

There was a suspicion that the dominant group of councillors, independents who were mainly members of and/or activists in the Labour Party, wanted to be able to boast about completing the schools project when up for re-election. Recently, Donald John MacSween, who stood as a Labour parliamentary candidate in 2010, and is now standing for re-election as an independent councillor said, “This year, when we go in to the new school session, nearly half of the pupils in all of the Western Isles will be in new schools. I think that's a major achievement.”

Under pressure from the local SNP and the community, those “independent” Labour councillors have recently started to claim that it was the Scottish Government, and not the council, who set the timetable for the programme. Cllr. MacSween stated, “A major disappointment, of course, in the last five years, was the way the Scottish Government would not allow us to parcel up the schools in individual packages to give local companies an opportunity to tender and to secure the work. They were quite emphatic that that could not happen, they didn't allow us to do it and it caused quite a lot of controversy in the community.”

This statement, whilst reinforcing the potential benefits to the local economy of a staged development, directly contradicts the SNP group's assertion that it was the council and not the Government, who set the timetable for the project.

A recent enquiry by the leadership of the Western Isles SNP led to the following statement by a Scottish Government spokesman, “The Western Isles Schools Project was tendered by Western Isles Islands Council. Scottish Government and Scottish Futures Trust did not play any part in the tender process, including the timescales of the project, and it was the Council’s decision to award the contract to FMP.”

This statement entirely backs up the SNP group's version of events and is entirely incompatible with the statement made by Cllr. MacSween, and with many similar assertions made recently by his colleagues in the local press.

There appears to be nothing in the Scottish Government tendering regulations which would preclude the setting of separate sequential contracts. In the light of this, it seems unlikely that the Government would have forced the council to construct the contract in a particular way, nor has the council group who claim government interference managed to produce a single document to back up their claim.

Bob Duncan, campaign organiser for the Western Isles SNP, and a candidate for Stornoway South, the ward in which the Nicolson Institute is located, had this to say,

“There is tremendous anger in the community that the ruling group in the Comhairle nan Eilean Siar has, either deliberately or through incompetence, allowed so much money and so many jobs to be lost to the islands.

“This £120 million project will not be repeated in our lifetimes, and the opportunities it offered have been lost to us for ever. Our kids have gained new schools a little faster than they might have, but at the pointless and unnecessary cost of the jobs and livelihoods of their parents. The schools would have been rebuilt either way, but now the fragile local economy will need to be rebuilt too, and this may take us decades.

“It is no wonder there is so much anger in the community and no wonder that the old guard of the Labour Party are facing annihilation in these elections. Theirs has surely been the most expensive, damaging and dishonest election stunt in Hebridean history.