3. When the GFG Alliance took over the aluminium smelter and power station in Lochaber in 2016, it received a Scottish Government guarantee that was worth £575 million. The company promised to build an aluminium wheel factory, create 2,000 jobs and add £1 billion to the local economy. It said that the plan was “oven ready”. Five years later, there is no wheel factory.

The company said that it would invest in a new aluminium-bottle plant, but that has not happened either. Since the collapse of its financial partner, Greensill, what update has the First Minister received about the 2,000 promised jobs for Lochaber?

The Scottish Government is in regular contact with the GFG Alliance, at Lochaber, at the Dalzell steel plant and at overall group level. The original investment plan for Fort William was impacted by the sharp fall in the United Kingdom’s automotive industry output. The business has put forward new investment plans totalling £94 million, and we continue to liaise closely with it about the challenges that it faces and the steps that it needs to take to make sure that it delivers on its commitments.

As Parliament would expect, we have taken a series of securities over the assets of GFG Alliance at Lochaber, including the smelter, the Lochaber power station and landholdings, and we have a series of other protections in support of the guarantee.

Serious difficulties have been posed for companies, individuals and the public sector—as we have just reflected on with regard to the national health service—by Covid. We need to work through, recognise and resolve them.

At the starting point, which predates Covid, had the Government not worked to try to facilitate GFG becoming the owners of the aluminium smelter at Lochaber, the smelter would have closed and we would not have been able to protect any jobs there or give any hope for the future. Sometimes, Governments have to be creative and work hard under all the constraints that apply in doing our best to save jobs and provide positive economic outlooks for parts of the country that badly need them. That is what we have tried to do with the smelter and the Dalzell steel works; it is what we will always try to do in such industrial situations.

The First Minister went to the smelter, had her photograph taken, and said that it was boom time. To a great fanfare, she went to Burntisland Fabrications, backed by millions of pounds, but that did not work out, either. Five years ago, she signed a deal with the Chinese company SinoFortone, which said that it was worth billions of pounds. The company was not a billionaire; it owned a pub in Oxford. The deal involved lots of selfies and lots of taxpayers’ money, but there are certainly not 2,000 new jobs.

The public and the workers deserve an explanation. How much money has been lost? How can it be right that a company can use a 30-year Government financial guarantee to make profits yet fail to deliver the jobs that it promised?

The First Minister:

T hose are choices that Governments have to make, because the alternative to trying to work with companies to secure the future of industrial sites or plants and to secure jobs is just to let such places go to the wall there and then, after which there are no jobs, no opportunities and no prospects for the future.

In many cases, because of the action that we have taken—for example with the Dalzell steel works—we have managed to protect jobs when the only alternative would have been complete and utter closure. Similarly, on BiFab: yes, it struggles and we have a long way to go, but the alternative to the work that we did was just to let BiFab there and then go to the wall.

The same is true for Prestwick airport. The investments that we have had to make there have protected jobs. Although the situation remains difficult and challenging, the only alternative is simply to give up on things—to give up on the jobs and on the economic prospects, and to say that there is nothing that the Government can do. We are not that kind of passive “stand back and wash our hands of problems” Government, nor will I ever want that to be the case. We are an activist Government when it comes to trying to protect jobs and economic prospects; that is what we will always be.