Having chosen to appoint to the post of Executive Director for Economic Development and Infrastructure a waste management specialist who happened to be personally known to the Chief Executive, Argyll and Bute Council has been left facing the obvious and and rather pressing problem.
What do they do about economic development?
The news from Kilmory is that they have come up with their familiar wheeze for distancing themselves from responsibility and inability – throw public money at it and outsource it.
Believe it or not, the council is known to be considering a consultancy contract to provide economic development policy.
At the same time, they are to run a conference on depopulation in Dunoon in early May, with Finance Secretary John Swinney.
Economic development and re-population go hand in hand; and strategic infrastructural development precedes them.
Argyll suffers from the toxic marriage of its physical nature, which leaves it without a centre – and the nature of local politics which see the pork barrel shared between our five major towns, with no strategic purpose other than pacifying every councillor’s local vote.
Whatever carpetbagging set of consultants get wheeled in to join those with their feet already profitably tucked in below the clueless Kilmory table, this second largest local authority area in Scotland will make no progress until its central lack is successfully addressed.
Argyll has to have one really large town as centrally located as is possible with our topography. Without the base to create critical mass, economic development in Argyll is impossible.
That leaves only one option – Oban. The other four are geographically peripheral, meaning that their enlargement and their transformation into a regional economic powerhouse would not and could not impact on the wider Argyll and the Isles.
Oban also has a rudimentary infrastructure to build on. It has a rail head. It is the major west coast ferry port. It has an embedded part of the regional private sector bus company. It has an airport – the wrong airport in the wrong place and which would have to be relocated and specified by someone [not the council] who really knows about the civil aviation world. It has some waterfront development in the pipeline.
Oban has one of Scotland’s chief academic research resources in marine biology on its doorstep – the Scottish Association of Marine Science at Dunstaffnage. SAMS has serious and perpetual scope for commercial spin offs in private sector investment in appropriate research results – if this direction of travel is skilfully driven.
Oban has every capacity to develop marine activity tourism around every marine-based sport imaginable, with enviable resources on all fronts. It has some fabulous annual marine sporting events, with some good and experienced specialist activity and experience providers.
It has McCaig’s Tower; good heritage resources; a distillery; a real ale brewery; a couple of decent hotels and the Five Star Isle of Eriska just up the road’; a shed load of good B&Bs; a couple of good restaurants – with a fair percentage of the pit stop variety – and a scenic location that is unsurpassable.
To make Argyll work, Oban has to be the focus. A large and fully thrilling successful town there, with no grubby, shabby little cheapskate corners, but flair, imagination, courage and investment would invigorate Argyll to the north, east and south – and feed the isles.
But Oban today is only a sketch, an indication of what it might become.
This would be hugely expensive and it would have to be superbly well conceived and executed.
Like it or not, Kerrera is key to it – as are two bridges to it, one at either end – and integrated road system development.
The awful present notion of the ‘Dunbeg corridor’ will kill what Oban already has, never mind its prospect of better.
Private sector investment would have to come in to ramp up business development and facilities at all levels and for all audiences. The funding for the infrastructural development would have to come from the government [and they owe the west for their long paucity of economic development strategy].
Argyll and Bute Council has got nothing resembling the skillset to get anywhere near achieving what is necessary; nor indeed does the Scottish Government.
So the first conundrum is to work out how it could be done.
If we carry on as we have done for so long, sharing out the bread by throwing periodic crumbs to Campbeltown, Helensburgh, Oban, Rothesay and Dunoon, Argyll will die.
If we do not and cannot do something bold, adventurous and unparochial, and if government cannot be convinced of the imperative to invest seriously in the west coast, Argyll will die and will deserve to do so.
We predict the familiar five portions of crumbs but hope for better.
