Swinney ‘breathtakingly cynical’ towards Alexander Dennis workers – Marra

The Scottish Government ditched a furlough scheme for staff at a bus manufacturing plant before the Holyrood election – despite claims in SNP leaflets vowing to “protect” jobs, Labour’s Michael Marra has said.

The Scottish Labour leader branded the move by John Swinney’s Government “breathtakingly cynical”.

The decision not to go ahead with furlough payments for workers at the Alexander Dennis plant in Falkirk was made the day before the May 7 Scottish Parliament election, Mr Marra claimed.

Raising the issue at First Minister’s Question’s in Holyrood on Thursday, he said that at the same time, leaflets were going out in the area “with the SNP pledging to protect local jobs at the bus manufacturer”.

Mr Swinney told him: “In a pre-election period, the Government is restricted in what announcements it can make about particular policy questions.

“That is the explanation for the decision-making and the time-scales around the Alexander Dennis decision.”

Mr Marra further accused the Government of trying to “rush through” orders under a scheme that helps fund greener buses, but with the order for Alexander Dennis less than had been anticipated, he said ministers “realised they had made a mess of it and then decided to cancel the furlough the day before Scotland went to the polls”.

As a worker from the plant watched on from the public gallery at Holyrood, the Labour leader said: “The First Minister must understand how this looks.

“He surely understands how breathtakingly cynical it feels to people, especially to the 115 workers who have lost their jobs and the further 164 who look set to possibly do so too.”

Mr Swinney insisted however that the Scottish Government had “engaged constructively” to try to protect jobs at the site “over a sustained period of time”.

The First Minister continued: “What we offered to Alexander Dennis was a furlough scheme that the Scottish Government has never offered to any other employer beforehand, designed to ensure there was support to Alexander Dennis to enable it to overcome the difficulties and challenges the company faced.

“The issue on which the final decision on the furlough scheme rested came down to the fact that company decided to opt for a model which was not possible to be supported under the furlough scheme.”

Announcing the £4 million furlough scheme last year, Mr Swinney claimed at the time the future of the Falkirk plant had been “secured” thanks to the Government’s intervention.

But in March this year, Alexander Dennis announced plans to close the site, with a consultation on converting its nearby facility in Larbert to chassis manufacturing.

Transport Secretary Stephen Flynn has previously told MSPs that meant the company, which was Scotland’s only bus manufacturer, had failed to meet the conditions set out in the furlough scheme – which included having “contracted orders for buses to be built in Scotland”.

Speaking on Thursday, Mr Marra said: “The simple reality is that the SNP did not buy enough Scottish buses.”

Mr Swinney however said that since 2020, the company had received “around 483 vehicle orders” as a result of Government schemes to accelerate the switch to zero emission buses.