A Scottish Government shipbuilding expert said a failure to agree on designs before controversial ferry contracts were signed played a major part in the fiasco which has led to costs soaring and delays of at least five years.

Evidence provided by Commodore Luke van Beek has been put forward by Jim McColl the tycoon who headed Ferguson Marine as he hit back at claims that past issues caused by his shipyard firm were a prime cause of the problems.

David Tydeman, the chief executive of the nationalised Ferguson Marine (Port Glasgow) claimed that past management and build errors cost the taxpayer £90m extra.

Both Glen Sannox and the unnamed Hull 802 were due online in the first half of 2018, with one initially to serve Arran and the other to serve the Skye triangle routes to North Uist and Harris, but are at least five years late. Meanwhile costs have spiralled from £97m to around £340m.

The Herald:

Mr Tydeman in response to questions from a ferry inquiry carried out by the Scottish Parliament's public audit committee strongly criticised the errors made by Ferguson Marine before nationalisation.

Mr Tydeman responded after MSPs asked him for help in tracing £128m of public money which was ploughed into Ferguson Marine.

It had previously emerged that inquiries with the company into the ferry building scandal by Scotland's Auditor General Stephen Boyle failed to uncover what happened to the money. He has said existing records relating to transactions were "not organised or categorised".

READ MORE: Ferguson Marine CEO responds to questions on 'lost' £128m ferry money

Public spending watchdogs Audit Scotland have also admitted that it was unable to trace how a Scottish Government loans to shipbuilding firm Ferguson Marine Engineering Limited (FMEL) was spent.

But Mr McColl has hit back saying that the problems originated from inadequate specifiations provided by Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd (CMAL) - the taxpayer-funded company which buys and leases publicly owned CalMac's ships on behalf of the Scottish government, He said this was confirmed by Commadore Luke van Beek, the government appointed expert on shipbuilding who had examined the shipyard from around 2018.

Evidence seen by the Herald showed Mr van Beek was surprised that in a design and build contrct, the design had not been totally agreed and that this had caused "significant downstream problems" in building the ships.

He said that he was surprised at how "signficant extensive" subsequent changes to the design were and this led to a "significantly deteriorating relationship" between Ferguson Marine and CMAL, to the point that they had become "very adversarial".

"I would not normally expect anybody to enter into such a contract until the vast majority, at least as much as 90% of the design was fixed," he says in his analysis.

“If you are going to put in place a design and build contract you should have the specification almost complete when you let the contract, that was not what happened at all.

"It was the whole issue around the number of things that had not been specified that caused so much of the delay in the design process."

He also said there was a "lot of fault" on both sides at the beginning of the contract.

The Herald:

"I believe that the contract was let too early. I have no idea why Ferguson’s started building the ships having got a contract that was not specified enough," he says. "The best way of putting it is probably that I would not have done that; I would have said that the contract was not specified enough."

Ferguson Marine received £45m in loans from the Scottish Government used to support the business before it fell into administration in August, 2019 and was nationalised by ministers.

He said all funds were used to deal with the rising costs.

"The government had the detailed costs reviewed by consultants PwC before advancing the £45m," he said. "Before each drawdown, PwC and Commodore Luke van Beek had to sign off on the funds being exclusively applied to labour and material costs which were going into the construction of the ferries.

READ MORE: Ferguson Marine misses out again as ferries deal goes to Turkey

"All the money went towards covering the additional costs for the construction and this was forensically monitored by PwC. The mess that was created by nationalisation and Tim Hair (the turnaround director brought in by the Scottish Government) is why the costs have continued to increase at such an alarming rate."

Mr Tydeman said one of the the main issues were that pre-nationalisation Ferguson Marine started constructions of the hull and superstructures before the design was complete.

He said: "This always, in my experience, adds significant costs, and embeds design baps and future re-work."

He said the firm did "not follow conventional shipbuilding practices.

Building a "largely empty ship" could have doubled the sub-contractor and direct labour manhours.

But Mr McColl said the rise in costs originated form the "inadequate CMAL specification".

He added: "Tim Hair was brought in by the government when they nationalised the yard. He sacked all the senior team who had the detailed knowledge of the contract without any handover of information. He wiped out all the management systems and he dismissed (marine engineering firm) Vera Navis who had a team of design engineers working on the contracts, again without any detailed handover of design information.

"He eradicated all of the project history which is why, still today they don’t have a finalised design.

"They had to start from scratch. The cables were all installed properly to the original layout design for the control panels and equipment.

"Mr Hair had destroyed all knowledge of where the equipment and the control panels were designed to be, so when a new design contractor was brought in they placed control panels and equipment in different locations which is why the cables no longer reached."