It would be hard to send a more defensive signal than Vestas’s announcement that it is prepared to meet local representatives – if they travel to the company HQ in Denmark. Key players in the race to retrieve something from the company’s withdrawal from Campbeltown met yesterday in emergency session. Representatives from Argyll and Bute Council, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Westminster MP for the area, Alan Reid, met at the Council HQ in Lochgilphead. Denmark being their chosen duelling ground, no representatives from Vestas attended the meeting. This does not reflect well upon a company whose behaviour will have been very different when it was holding its hand out to take over £12 million of public subsidy to set up in Campbeltown in 2001 – 2002.
Council Leader. Dick Walsh, says that while many in the current workforce may be able to get jobs elsewhere, the drive is to ensure that a skilled and loyal workforce is retained in the area rather than dispersed. He notes that Vestas’s wage bill is said to be around £2.5 million per annum. This loss will make a major negative impact on the local economy of this thinly populated place.
Those who met agreed that they will ask the Scottish Government to field a delegation to meet the Vestas CEO as soon as possible. Jim Mather, Minister for Energy, Enterprise and Tourism and Argyll’s constituency MSP, is to meet the workforce in Campbeltown on Friday.
The issue has both a Scottish face – with the negative impact of the Vestas decampment damaging the fragile economy of Kintyre. It also has a UK face, with the involvement of the UK Government in the parallel positive move of Vestas into greater investment in the Isle of Wight. (One might ask – and we do – whose investment this will actually be?) However, the two-sided nature of the closure makes this a matter which requires sustained effort by both Argyll’s MSP and MP. Mr Mather’s Governmental responsibilities lend a weight and an authority of real benefit to Argyll.
Any positive outcome that may be brought about will need to pay attention to some statements made by Vestas in announcing their transfer to the Isle of Wight. They say – and the wind sector of the renewables energy industry would seem to agree, that the turbine blades manufactured at Campbeltown are part of a now obsolete technology; and that they (Vestas) are now focusing on engagement with developing technologies in the field. If they are right – and they will be, then there is little sense in simply, say, bringing in another headline manufacturer (with more subsidy inducements) or in supporting a status quo community or workforce buyout.
If the Scottish Government were to commit to engaging independently with developing technologies in renewable energy and cast Campbeltown in a role in such an initiative, then committed revenue might create a sound foundation for growth and sector leadership in the area and in the country.
See our two earlier pieces on this matter:
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