02-07-2025
- Business
- The Herald Scotland
Did the government forget to 'island-proof' the ferry fund?
The compensation pot, which opened for applications on Tuesday, offers grants of between £3,000 and £35,000 to firms on South Uist, Colonsay, North Uist, Eriskay, Benbecula, Berneray, Grimsay and Arran.
Mull, Iona, Coll, Tiree, Islay and others who've seen serious disruption get nothing.
To qualify, the islands had to have suffered from over 15% ferry service cancellations across three seasons — far above the 7% CalMac network average.
That's left businesses — and campaigners like Joe Reade from the Mull and Iona Ferry Committee — fuming.
Although they don't reach the threshold set out by the government, he says his community is still experiencing a 22% cut in ferry capacity this summer. They've already lost around 7,000 passenger visits — a clear blow to a local economy reliant on tourism.
But because these are classed as capacity cuts rather than cancellations, they're ignored by the fund's formula.
As Reade puts it, it's 'astonishing and bemusing' that ministers have chosen such a narrow and 'arbitrary' way to measure hardship.
It also, he believes, breaks the law.
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Passed with cross-party support, the Islands (Scotland) Act 2018 was meant to ensure that the specific needs of Scotland's island communities were not just recognised, but respected in law.
It places a clear duty on public bodies — including Scottish ministers — to 'have regard to island communities' when exercising their functions. In other words: island-proof your policy.
Part 3 of the Act says the government must carry out an Island Communities Impact Assessment (ICIA) when a policy is 'likely to have an effect on an island community which is significantly different from its effect on other communities (including other island communities).'
The ferry support fund clearly triggers that requirement. It's a policy about islands, aimed specifically at businesses on islands, that offers money to some and excludes others.
Reade says there's a wider issue here around the Islands Act.
'It is routinely ignored by governments at all levels, or just paid lip-service,' he tells me.
Herald readers will be familiar with my colleague James McEnaney's reporting on the row over the new school on Mull.
A petition for a Judicial Review has been lodged with the Court of Session in Edinburgh in an attempt to reverse Argyll and Bute Council's decision to build the school in Tobermory — a move that means kids from the south of Mull remain excluded from the only high school on their island.
'The ICIA the council were supposed to undertake was done far too late and without proper consultation,' Reade says.
The Learning Estate Investment Programme (LEIP), the central government funding scheme paying for the school, has also not been assessed against the Act. Technically, that's because it pre-dates the law — although it was announced a year after the Act passed.
'Scottish Government certainly had a moral obligation to 'island-proof' the LEIP programme,' Reade argues. 'But they did not.'
There's scant information about the IBRF. The first many island businesses heard about it was when journalists got in touch for comment on the Scottish Government's press release.
The Islands Act was supposed to be ground-breaking and promised meaningful change — but for many islanders, that promise remains unfulfilled.
