The Government’s Department of Infrastructure (DoI) has refused to disclose the remaining ‘snagging’ issues at the new ferry terminal in Liverpool.

The Merseyside facility welcomed its first passengers following the arrival of the Manannan at the site on Tuesday, June 25.

When planning consent was first granted for the facility in April 2019, the estimated cost of the development was £31.3m but that figure had increased by £6.5m by the time it received Tynwald funding approval in July that year.

Then at the end of 2021, Mr Crookall announced that the cost had almost doubled to more than £70.6m.

A recent freedom of information (FoI) request asked for a ‘snagging list of ongoing issues with the new ferry terminal in Liverpool’ to be published.

But the DoI has refused to release any information relating to the request, saying that while its aim is to ‘provide information whenever possible’, it said that in this instance ‘the information is exempt from disclosure under section 30(2)(b) of the Act.

The DoI added that disclosing the information would ‘prejudice the department’s ongoing activities in relation to the project’.

Below are a list of factors the department used to determine whether it should publish the information.

Factors in favour of disclosure:

• The need to hold public authorities to account for their stewardship of public resources.

• To build public trust and transparency in the operation of the economy.

Factors in favour of maintaining the exemption:

• The need to protect the commercial interests of the Department of Infrastructure, whose commercially related functions need to be exercised in the wider context of the public interest.

• Disclosure would unfairly prejudice the Department’s activities going forward.

• This is an ongoing/ live matter.

The DoI did however publish responses relating to two other queries contained in the FoI request.

The first related a breakdown of how many times the terminal’s new passenger access bridge had been rendered ‘unavailable’ since the facility opened.

The DoI said that in this instance, it does not hold or cannot find the information relating to the request after taking ‘reasonable steps’ to do so.

It did however that the number of passenger seats available in the new terminal’s departure lounge was 328 after the question was raised in the FoI request.