New Petitions

I am.

We thank the committee for giving us an opportunity to use the democratic structure of the Scottish Parliament to present our case for the retention of the Barra lifeline air service to the mainland. Our petition responds to Lewis Macdonald's decision to issue the public service obligation tender for the Barra to Glasgow air service for one year only, whereas PSO tenders for Tiree and Campbeltown were issued for the standard three years. By doing so, he has put at risk not only the Barra to Glasgow air service, but the Barra to Benbecula air service and Barra airport. His action raises questions about the Scottish Executive's commitment to all air services that are covered by PSOs. Mr Macdonald has acted without consulting the island's local authority, the health board or—most important—the Barra community.Barra is a vibrant and vital island that makes a significant contribution to the Scottish economy. Annually, we export more than £1 million-worth of fish and shellfish to Europe. Currently, we provide the merchant navy and the oil industry with more than 100 skilled seamen. We export skills and young people. Through the traditions of crofting and fishing, we play an important role in protecting the ecology of a fragile area.Mr Macdonald's actions threaten the viability of the island. The loss of onshore and off-island jobs, the impact on health care, education, economic development and tourism and the increasing sense of isolation that would follow any withdrawal of the lifeline service would have a catastrophic effect on the island economy. Depopulation would surely follow.The minister has stated that the car ferry across the Sound of Barra will give Barra access to the air service out of Benbecula. Regardless of health and weather conditions, the people of Barra would have to travel 40 miles north by ferry and single-track road to turn around and travel south-east to Glasgow. At best, that route would require three or more hours for travelling from Barra to Glasgow, although it is more likely that it would require five to eight hours and often an en route overnight stay in bad weather. It is like making people in Edinburgh drive to Dundee in order to go to Glasgow, but it is more serious in its implications for individual travellers.It is ludicrous to think that such a route can substitute for a direct one-hour air service from Barra to Glasgow. Moreover, in the planning for the Eriskay causeway and the Sound of Barra ferry, no hint was ever made that such an inter-island service would replace the direct air service from Barra to Glasgow—it was never thought of as a substitute for mainland air services.We recognise that public subsidies must provide full value for money. The benefits of air services to Barra, the Western Isles and the rest of Scotland must exceed the cost of subsidies for those services. We know that proper studies will establish that they do and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The Executive has made no such studies in reaching its decision. It is time that it did so.It is also time that the Executive started to follow statutory and other governmental policies of consulting the people who will be affected. The drastic action of shortening the PSO tender to one year was taken with no consultation—that is simply unacceptable for an Executive that is committed to open government.We need to be told about the consultation. What will it be about? Why, where and when will it take place? Who will consult? We urge the Parliament to bend every effort to cause the Executive to remove the immediate threat to the Barra air service by extending the Glasgow to Barra PSO to three years and to carry out promptly each element of the remedy that is outlined in our statement. If the Executive does so conscientiously, we have every confidence that it will decide without reservation that the lifeline Barra to Glasgow air service must be continued for the indefinite future.Finally, on a point of procedure, we are concerned by the fact that the Parliament will be dissolved by the end of March—the same point at which Mr Macdonald has committed himself to make an announcement about the extension of the PSO tender. We ask the committee to request that his announcement be made no later than mid-March so that the issue can be examined prior to dissolution. I thank the committee for listening.

There is some health service provision within the Western Isles, as the First Minister said when he answered the question on Thursday. He stated that there was a new hospital in Benbecula; that hospital is a GP-led hospital. There is also a new hospital in Stornoway. We use the Stornoway hospital, but patients have to fly from Barra to Benbecula to Stornoway. A lot of services are not available in Stornoway, and our patients have to go to Glasgow for those services. If patients are seriously ill and need emergency evacuation, that is a case for the air ambulance, but if patients who are fit to fly are travelling backwards and forwards for routine treatment—for example for chemotherapy—they use the direct plane to Glasgow.Many of those patients are frail and could not stand up to a journey from Castlebay to Ardmhòr, then a ferry crossing that can be extremely rough, a journey on single-track roads to Benbecula, then a wait on Benbecula for a flight out to Glasgow. That journey puts a lot of pressure on people who are already not well, whereas they can cope with a direct flight to Glasgow. If we lose our air service to Glasgow and to Benbecula, a lot more air ambulances will be needed, because patients will not be able to use the service that they can currently use.

Yes. We would need more air ambulances for routine health appointments rather than for emergency evacuations.

I will let Karen MacLean answer that question, because she has had experience of maternity cases and the difficulties that are associated when maternity cases are off-island.

The answer to Rhoda Grant's question is yes. If somebody is in difficulty at the end stage of the pregnancy, it is necessary to get them to Glasgow, where they can be dealt with quickly and effectively. If we visit people in the morning, we can usually get them on to the scheduled flight and away to Glasgow sharply. If we had no flights, there would be either the added expense of an air ambulance or they would be taken on the Sound of Barra ferry, which takes 50 minutes. The journey would have to be tied in with the timetable, because the timetable does not work to your advantage when you want to get somebody somewhere in a hurry. Even if the journey could be done in time, it would cause great discomfort to have to go on the ferry, and delaying things would put the mother and the unborn child at risk.Mothers-to-be understand that the island is remote and they are prepared to deal with that. They know that there is a flight out fairly sharply or there is an air ambulance; withdrawing the flight would put everybody's health at quite serious risk.

Yes. That is the case without a doubt. I recently spoke to one of the secondary school teachers, who is not from Barra; we take in most of our teachers. When she came to the island, she stated clearly that the air service was one of the matters that she considered before she took the contract to work in the school. She has a young son and she said that while it is all right for her to put herself at risk if she is living somewhere remote, she would not be prepared to put her son at risk. If there had been no air service, she would not have come and if we lose the service she will leave, as will an awful lot of the teachers on the island. Many of the teachers in the schools are not from the island, so they need to be able to get on and off the island quickly. If there is no air service, not many teachers will come to teach our children.

We left on Saturday and we will not get back until tomorrow afternoon.

Yes. We could have left yesterday, but we would not have arrived in Edinburgh until about 7 o'clock, which was far too late. If the weather conditions had changed, we would not have been here at all.

I do not know. That is one of the flaws in the argument.

We would like to understand precisely the answer to your question. The first announcement that was made advised us that the service was to be reviewed because there was an overlap in services. However, the alternative service offers double the cost and a 500 per cent increase in travel time. In that context, we struggle to understand the definition of overlap. The announcement also mentioned the tenability of the airport. We understood from the use of the word "tenability" that the issue was about the future of the airport itself. We are committed to the development of fixed runways and so on. However the answer that we were given on the issue of tenability was:"The Executive needs to ensure that the Glasgow-Barra air service and Barra Airport are capable of being retained for the long-term within the constraints of public expenditure".That is different to our understanding of what was meant by tenable.I am also concerned about the review. What precisely will be considered in the review? What are the parameters? As we understand it, decisions on public service obligations are based on the lifeline definitions of frequency, cost, capacity, length of passage and so on. It seems that those definitions are to be reviewed and revised in the case of Barra, but is it reasonable or right that we should have a lesser service than other places with lifeline services? Is the basis of the lifeline service being reviewed entirely? If it is, is it reasonable that only one community's service should be reviewed, when many diverse communities depend on lifeline services?The question that John Farquhar Munro poses is hugely relevant and we need answers to it, which is part of the reason for our bringing the matter to the Parliament.

When the Executive raised the question of overlap on the introduction of the new ferry between Barra and Eriskay, we expected it to cause conflict not on our direct ferry services from Oban to Castlebay, but on the triangle between Castlebay and Lochboisdale. To date, we have not lost that Castlebay to Lochboisdale link, but CalMac is looking at that for next year in the consultation that will take place on next summer's timetable, because that is the route that is now surplus to requirements.With a bigger vehicle-carrying vessel on the Sound of Barra, there is no longer such a requirement for the Castlebay to Lochboisdale link. That is the only part of our mainland ferry service that we see dropping, but that reflects the fact that the Eriskay causeway and the Sound of Barra ferry are improvements to the infrastructure within the Western Isles. From the Butt of Lewis to Barra Head is in excess of 150 miles. We had to improve the infrastructure throughout the Western Isles, because it is a unitary local authority. The council was committed to doing that. We did not expect to get that improvement, then suddenly to be told, "You don't need a flight to Glasgow."

When the health board was drawing up its brief report, the Scottish air ambulance service stated that it saw the air ambulance service continuing. When we investigated further, the air ambulance service actually said that it will be the responsibility of the contractor who delivers the service. The contractor at present is Loganair. The Civil Aviation Authority may not be quite so involved with a landing for the air ambulance, but the air ambulance service still requires a safe landing area.If the airport closes—we will certainly fight as hard as we can to ensure that it does not—the beach will still be there, but it is a living entity. Part of the work of the airport firemen is to ensure that the area within the markers—there is a designated air landing strip within the markers—remains safe. Banks of shells move across the beach like waves. Part of the role of the firemen is to ensure that those banks are levelled, because at some points they are big enough to tip a plane if it lands on them. Once the staff are no longer there to ensure that the beach is safe, there will be a question mark over where the air ambulance Islander can land. If the Islander cannot land, helicopter evacuation will be needed. To my knowledge, helicopter evacuation costs £5,000, whereas an air ambulance costs about £2,000. You can see that costs would immediately escalate.

When there is an air ambulance call-out, the crew checks the beach and if any debris has been washed in by the tide or there are any problems on the beach, it deals with it before the air ambulance comes in. If nobody is there to do that, the air ambulance is put at risk.

If we come over a weekend, our normal return fare is in the region of £140. If I come out for a meeting on Monday and I want to get back on a Wednesday, the fare is about £190. We were given a special concession and our fares were £99 return.

I just wish that we were living in Ireland.

We have been looking at different countries in Europe, such as Ireland, France, Germany and Greece. We were optimistic that the Scottish Parliament would start leading us down the road of giving us modest improvements, if nothing else, in fare structures for the people whom you are talking about and additional fares. Instead, we have been rocked into having to defend the very existence of the service. That is where we are.

I certainly do. When we were preparing our submission for today's meeting, we nearly asked whether the Glasgow to Edinburgh rail service would be removed because there is a Glasgow to Edinburgh motorway. A similar thing is being done in Barra. We need fast access to and from the island if we are to get investment in our young people and our community. We are investing a lot in information technology skills and skills that we hope can help remote communities to create employment and bring back to the island some of the highly skilled graduates who currently work on the mainland.We need to take the plane—I cannot leave my house and drive more than five miles without having to go on either a plane or the ferry. That is the reality of life on Barra. If I want to travel more than half an hour away from my house, I hop on a plane or the ferry. Gone are the days when island people left home once a year for a fortnight. We are coming and going as required to meet business and to meet the island's needs. That is the key to the issue. The plane is part of our transport infrastructure.

Until the announcement was made that the tender was being issued only for a year, we had heard nothing. We do not know why that decision had been made and there has, for some time, been a question mark in our minds over the future of the beach as a landing strip.I would like to respond to a comment that was made by Maureen Macmillan, because there seems to be some confusion. The beach is a high-profile landing area, but there are restrictions on the types of planes that can land on it. Even Lewis Macdonald made a mistake when he talked about the referendum on the hard air strip. That referendum asked two questions: the first was whether we wanted a hard landing strip to replace the beach landing strip for a scheduled passenger service. The votes showed that 365 people did and 235 did not. A few politicians around this table would be happy with a majority of that scale.

We were in favour of a hard landing strip. We were also asked whether we wanted the hard landing strip to be at or on the Tràigh Mhòr. However, because the final design on the feasibility study that was produced put the landing strip right out across the Tràigh Mhòr, people said no to the question whether they wanted the hard landing strip there. They were concerned about the impact on the beach of a huge, solid rock structure. The Tràigh Mhòr is not only an airport—it has a biomass of about 900 tonnes of cockles, which plays a part in the economy of the island. Furthermore, at the time of the referendum, the cockles had played a part in changing the law of Scotland because, in order to protect the cockles, we supported a ban on mechanical harvesting of cockles throughout Scotland. We were sensitive about the use of the Tràigh Mhòr.There is room on the machair for a hard landing strip without it coming out onto the beach. That issue has come up on a number of occasions in relation to the viability of the project. However, that was not said in October when Lewis Macdonald said that he was restricting the tender. He said that he was reviewing the viability of the Glasgow to Barra air service.There is another PSO that is linked to our air service: the inter-island PSO that covers the route between Stornoway, Benbecula and Barra, which is a separate contract. The Western Isles Council was going to issue that contract for three years, as usual, until it got a letter from the Scottish Executive which said that it could not. The council was told that, because the Scottish Executive was issuing the Glasgow to Barra tender for only one year, the other tender had also to be issued for only one year. The council was not consulted on that decision.At the public meeting in Barra in January to which Alasdair Morrison referred, Lewis Macdonald stated that not only was the viability of the Glasgow to Barra air service being reviewed, the viability of the Barra to Benbecula air service was being reviewed—even though it was not a Scottish Executive PSO—as was the viability of the beach. That is how we are being drip-fed information.

We would not be happy if we were told only that the review period will be extended. We have not been told what is to be reviewed or why the review is being carried out. Will the review consider the whole question whether the Barra service is a lifeline service? We will be concerned if the review does not consider that. Our petition is looking for the tender to be extended, but we want a commitment to the Barra service and a recognition that it is a lifeline service. That must be part of the review. We want to know what is being reviewed, how it is being reviewed and by whom it is being reviewed. Other than the public statements, our community has received no communication to explain why. We do not know why the review is being carried out.We have also had to work our way into and learn quickly about the procedures of the Scottish Parliament. We would be very concerned if an announcement were made on 31 March and the issue was then closed so that we could not come back to Parliament if we were unhappy. We want an announcement to be made as early as possible so that our elected MSPs can consider the matter and discuss it before coming back to us, and so that we can talk to them before Parliament is dissolved. If that does not happen, we want the petition to continue so that the new Parliament can deal with the matter fully and in depth. We are wary of the whole matter just dropping out of sight.

No. Absolutely nothing like that was ever said anywhere. We hear talk about rationalisation and saving money within a particular pot, but if there had been such a suggestion, it was made without the knowledge of the community or the council. It would be obscene if the people were not given the option of understanding the choice that was being made. In fact, there was no choice.Mr Gallie suggested that the proposal compares to removing the train link between Edinburgh and Glasgow and leaving just the M8. I would go much further than that. In context, the change would be like saying that it is all right to take away the M8 and the railway service between Edinburgh and Glasgow simply because people could go via Dundee.

Thank you for listening to us and for helping us with the petition.