Brian Leishman

Good morning, Mr Turner. It is a pleasure to have you in the Chair, as always. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard (Alex Mayer) for securing the debate. I wish to concentrate on the industrial and procurement elements in respect of buses and coaches. I refer right hon. and hon. Members to my membership of Unite the union. At the end of March, Alexander Dennis announced that there would be 115 job losses and an end to Scottish bus manufacturing in Falkirk. In my constituency, the Larbert site has been converted to chassis manufacturing. The week before Alexander Dennis made that announcement, the Scottish Government declared the results of the £45 million Scottish zero emission bus challenge fund, or ScotZEB 3. In total, 334 zero emission vehicles were to be built. Alexander Dennis was awarded 123 buses, which is just 36% of the total, whereas just under half of all orders—for 166 buses—were awarded to a Chinese company Yutong. Make no mistake: the SNP Scottish Government were fully aware that ScotZEB was essential for the sustainability of the Alexander Dennis sites in Scotland. The SNP also knew that Alexander Dennis workers needed the Scottish Government to back them, but the SNP backed China instead. Of course, as with all industrial issues, there is a ripple or knock-on effect. For every job in bus manufacturing, there is a multiplier of three to four jobs in the wider supply chain and support services. The 115 job losses on the site really translates into hundreds more job losses—maybe even as high as four figures—in the supply chain across the Forth valley and the rest of Scotland. What is happening at Alexander Dennis is another example in a catalogue of industrial closures impacting Scotland. I say respectfully to the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) that he is welcome to challenge me and intervene on anything that I am about to say. The truth is that the SNP solution was a furlough scheme, introduced with the aim of providing a stopgap solution, so that NFI—the Canadian-based owners of Alexander Dennis—could come up with a rescue plan, but no rescue plan was forthcoming. The SNP strategy was, “Let’s give NFI a pot of money and hope that the problem will go away.” Instead of doing anything meaningful that would actually save the jobs, all the SNP had to offer was a stalling tactic: delay the news of the inevitable SNP Scottish Government’s failure to help and save Scottish bus manufacturing until after the Holyrood election. The SNP put its own party’s success at the ballot box well ahead of workers and industry in Scotland.