Three years ago, the Scottish Government came up with an intelligent and imaginative scheme to support the sustainability of Scotland’s inhabited islands by equalising ferry fares with the cost of travelling similar distances by road. This was the Road Equivalent Tariff (RET) proposition. It was decided to run a trial for a 30 month period in the Argyll Isle of Coll and in the Western Isles, to allow measurement of its impact in attracting visitors. There was no need to measure the impact on the cost of living of the islands’ residents or on travel related business costs. That would be a guaranteed positive for both.
The initial trial period was due to end in the Spring of 2011, at which point the government decided to extend it by a further year.
The total cost of the subsidy for the almost four year trial will be between £28 and £29 million.
The government has now decided to continue the trial for a further three years to 2015, with annual projected costs of £4.5 million – a reduction in the amount of the subsidy from that of the single year extension from 2011-12, which was £6.5 million. The total subsidy for the islands within the scheme will be £42 million for a period of six and a half years.
There appears to be confusion, though, in government thinking on when and how the extension of the scheme to the other islands will happen, if the trial is shown to have been successful – and there has already been plenty of time for such comparative evidence to emerge.
If the scheme is extended to some but not all of the other islands, such a decision would only reignite the claims of competitive unfairness which accompanied the trial scheme and its first extension. Some islands would be doubly disadvantaged by such a move.
It is said both that, or the time being, the government has decided not to extend the scheme to any additional islands – and that Transport Scotland has been looking at opening it up to the Argyll and Clyde islands. That, of course, would leave the Small Isles and the Skye satellite isle of Raasay caught unsubsidised between two privileged island chains – and with Orkney and Shetland feeling an even colder breeze out in the north Atlantic.
Stopping the trial and leaving all of the islands equally unsubsidised is, realistically, unthinkable.
Coll and the Western Isles will, by next Spring, have had three and a half years of RET subsidised ferry fares. That is more than time for household and business budgets to be calibrated on these rates – and for income projections by visitor related businesses to have become part of business plans and loan awards.
To throw these settled island, personal and business economies into immediate reverse in the middle of a double dip recession could be acceptable to no one. The consequences of the fiscal instability in Greece and Italy are not yet calculable; and the economy of the Western Isles has long been non-viable, existing only with substantial additional state subsidy.
The question now is three fold:
- to leave all the remaining islands with a familiar staus quo for a further period;
- to advantage some more islands by adding them to the scheme – but leaving others with a compound disadvantage and an evidenced sense of neglect;
- to find the money to make the scheme apply universally to all of Scotland’s ferry-serviced islands and remote peninsulas.
In relation to this last issue – of peninsular remoteness – in Argyll we think of the positions of the Cowal peninsula, the Kintyre peninsula and the massive bulk of Ardnamurchan, much of which is historically in Argyll.
Since the reason for the subsidy is to reinforce the sustainability of communities reliant upon ferry services, there really can be no question that the remote peninsulas – and don’t let’s forget the remotest of the lot, Knoydart – must be included.
Of the three options above, simple justice suggests that only options one and three are valid.