Argyll & Bute Council buys its way out of a tight spot on waterfront development funding – but Argyll’s the winner

Argyll and Bute Council set up competitive bidding for funding from a £10 million prize pot for waterfront development. Contesting towns were Campbeltown, Dunoon, Helensburgh, Oban and Rothesay. The Council retained consultants over a significant period to rate initial and final bids. The decision was to be taken yesterday at a full Council meeting at Kirn. And it was.

Faced with the hard side of competition – creating losers as well as winners and wanting to secure unanimous agreement, the decision was – to fund them all. This exposes weaknesses of leadership and decision-taking in the Council. It makes absolute nonsense of the whole adrenaline-driven circus the Council created around the competition that wasn’t.

But it does mean that these Argyll towns will together see an investment of £31 million instead of £10. This cannot be other than very good news for Argyll, particularly in these days of financial uncertainty and threatened job losses

Related decisions were agreed:

• to extend the programme over a fifth year with an additional £2.5 million from the capital programme
• to increase the budget for loans charges by £100,000 over the next five years, thereby providing funding for a further £7 million of capital expenditure
• to allocate £6 million from the capital plan’s unallocated 2012 roads budget to the Oban Development Road.

Together with the inclusion of £5.3 million already committed for the development at Dunoon, these actions produce the additional £21 million now made available to fund all five towns’ schemes.

The waterfront development allocations made to the five towns are:

• Rothesay Pavilion and other townscape improvements in the town will receive £2.4m
• Campbeltown will receive £6.5m to revitalise the strategic Kinloch Road area of the town, develop the existing marina and improve and restore heritage and conservation sites in the town centre.
• Helensburgh will receive £6.66m for a major traffic management and street improvement scheme to transform the town centre and to redevelop the esplanade.
• Oban will receive a total of £6.9m, £6m for the development road which will provide new routes into the town and open up areas for residential and commercial development and £0.9m to support development of a yacht haven in Oban Bay or actions to improve the efficiency of the harbour itself.
• Dunoon will receive £8.3m towards the redevelopment of Dunoon Pier to facilitate economic growth.

The external consultant’s ranking order of the strength of the final Initial Business Cases (IBCs) submitted by the five towns was: Rothesay, Campbeltown, Oban, Helensburgh and Dunoon. Bids were of different values depending on the projects proposed. The Consultants noted that all the bids had merit – a standard comment in such circumstances.

Those in Argyll who regularly complain in public about a Dunoon-bias in the Council – and the worldly-wise – will note that the decision to fund all five bids reverses Dunoon’s position after the consultants’ rankings of the IBCs. Its last place among the competing Initial Businesses Cases left it unlikely to receive any money from the prize pot. But yesterday’s decision effectively shot Dunoon to the top, scooping the pool with the largest amount of money awarded, at £8.3 million – in addition to the £5.3 million already committed to its development.

Councillors are currently congratulating themselves and each other over this ‘historic’ agreement between all political parties in the group. The day they are unanimous in agreeing a hard decision on merit alone will genuinely be a ‘historic’ achievement. What’s hard to agree in funding everything? Agreement is easy to reach when all vested interests get what they want. This was expensive, if economically beneficial, horsetrading – not true consensus.

So, a resounding three cheers for economic development and urban regeneration in all of the five Argyll towns which so badly need it – and particularly now.