Sarah Jones

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Jardine. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes and Mid Fife (Richard Baker) on securing such an important debate. I thank him for quoting Donald Dewar in the first speech of the Scottish Parliament in 1998. I worked in an office next to Donald Dewar for a couple of years and he was an incredible man. He also said in that speech: “We are fallible. We will make mistakes. But we will never lose sight of what brought us here: the striving to do right by the people of Scotland; to respect their priorities; to better their lot; and to contribute to the commonweal.” The debate this afternoon has shown that many Members are carrying on in that spirit and acting in that way on behalf of their constituents. One of the first issues that crossed our desks when we came to power last July was the challenge with Harland and Wolff. We were faced with a dilemma: if we had, as the shadow Minister suggested, thrown money immediately at the problem, we would have been throwing good money after bad. That was clear to anybody who had any sight of what was happening, but it was also clear that we were in a perilous position and we wanted to make sure that the Government could do whatever they could to save all four yards. There was a big push, for a number of reasons including the contracts that existed, to think about Belfast, and not to think about the four yards together. A collective piece of work was done in which I played a small part and my hon. Friends the Members for Glenrothes and Mid Fife and for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Torcuil Crichton), who has the Arnish port in his constituency, as well as the Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Defence and my boss the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, played a large part. They all wanted to make sure we could do some kind of deal. When I was sat in the Ministry of Defence with Navantia, we were scratching our heads and thinking, “What on earth needs to be done here?” It was a big piece of work, with a lot of hard work around the clock from officials. The Prime Minister intervened because he saw the importance of this good piece of work. My hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes and Mid Fife made the important point that we did not want to do this work out of a sense of charity. It was because the people at Methil, in his case, are enormously skilled, offering the possibility of future contracts and operations. We did not see it as charity; we saw it as protecting the talent we have in this country, and wanting to see it grow. When I had the privilege of going to Methil to meet and talk to some of the 200 workers, 50 of whom are apprentices, it was apparent that this was a place—though cold—where we built the things that defined the 20th century, and can also be where we build the things that will define the decades to come. It is important to keep that in mind. I want to touch on an issue many hon. Members raised about the Scottish Government, procurement and the award going to a Polish shipyard. I was talking to my hon. Friend the Member for Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West (Martin McCluskey) about that earlier today. He questioned why Poland had been chosen over Port Glasgow, which was a good question to ask. I know Anas Sarwar has also been asking questions. I heard the intervention about phase 2, and perhaps there is something to be pulled and gained from this, though what has transpired is a shame. There is a question about procurement, which both we and the Minister for Defence Procurement are looking at. We will keep doing that, including considering the Procurement Act 2023. I will soon be talking to that Minister, not only in this area but on steel, to see what more we can do.