Ardyne Point development issues

A planning application first lodged in 2007 by Sir Robert McAlpine’s business for a major development at Ardyne Point in southeast Cowal has been delayed. Argyll & Bute Council’s Planning Committee have now asked for as assessment of whether necessary road improvements could be justified.

The application is for a 220 berth marina with shoreside retail facilities, business units and a significant residential development including a 120 bed hotel and up to 220 flats and houses. It also includes a ferry terminal with linkspan and traffic management facilities.

At the time of the original application, Western Ferries made it known that it remained keen to develop berthing facilities at Ardyne Point. In its view,  a ferry from there to Rothesay on the nearby Isle of Bute would cut travel times and be useful to development in both Cowal and Bute.

There are core issues here which need to be foregrounded and which are disguised by relatively superficial matters. They include:

• the nature of private investment risk
• strategic planning for Argyll
• sustainability
• ferry services

These issues are approached below and the proposed McAlpine development is set against each of them.

Ardyne Point and private investment risk

Sir Robert McAlpine’s Ardyne Point at the entrance to Loch Striven was one of several oil rig fabrication yards established at the height of the oil industry boom in the 1970s.

Ardyne Point was only marginally more successful than its fellow rig construction yard at Portavadie in west Cowal. Portavadie never built a single rig. Ardyne managed only three for North Sea operations before having to close down as the  oil boom left town.

This is where Argyll & Bute Council needs to stop and take stock. Private investment risk is just that – private and risky. If risk comes with the reassuring precedent of future bail outs from the public sector, it is not risk. Capitalism trumpets the risk ethos. It celebrates its successes. It needs to embrace its failures.

There is no obligation of any kind on the public sector to assist private investors, small or very large, to convert a failed investment of one kind to a successful one of a different kind – unless any proposals put forward absolutely chime with priority strategic development plans for the area.

Without this overriding criterion, strategic regional development will continually be skewed – pulled here and pushed there by the return-on-investment (RoI) manoeuvres of large private enterprises like Sir Robert McAlpine’s.

To date Sir Robert McAlpine has tried two proposals to recover the company’s investment in Ardyne. Both of these could be said to be damaging to the immediate area and to skew wider development priorities in Argyll at large.

The first proposal in 2003 was indisputably hazardous and, although favourably received in London, was withdrawn after massive local outrage. It was a submission to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to use Ardyne Point as a facility for managing nuclear waste from decommissioned nuclear submarines, of which 11 were available at that time.

In 2007 the company bounced back with the above proposal that is still looking for planning consent.

Anyone and any business has the right to propose development of any kind but it is the Council’s duty to preside over responsible decisions made in the light of the overall strategic development needs of Argyll & Bute.

Beyond this, it is the Council’s duty to insist upon the execution of corporate social responsibility agreements made in connection with any planning consent.

In the case of McAlpine’s development of the Ardyne Point rig yard, an ecological survey of the area was carried out before the yard was commissioned. The idea of this was that the Council would enforce the restoration of the landscape and littoral-scape following decommissioning.

Ardyne has never been restored although in 2007 the Council indicated that to the best of its knowledge McAlpines had ‘ringfenced’ the money for the restoration. Presumably the 2007 and still current planning application was enough for the Council to delay insistence on restoration.

The question remains why the Council of the day did not immediately insist on the restoration of the area at the point of the decommissioning of the yard. The current Council must never make this sort of mistake. If such agreements have any meaning in protection of the public and of the environment, they must be enforced at the first opportunity and before any future development plans are considered. That, too, is part of the private capital risk and, if taken seriously at the outset, will have been factored into project costs.

Strategic planning for Argyll

Argyll’s core problem in development terms is that it lacks a centre and that its topography virtually prohibits the development of one. This means the dispersal and duplication of services and resources – for which Argyll & Bute Council has never been adequately funded.

Were it to be adequately funded, the area’s naturally dispersed structure offers advantages to be strategically deployed.

However, managing and developing Argyll as it is produces two clear priorities:

• transport systems – infrastructure and public transport
• the major towns

Without first class and affordable transport systems Argyll cannot develop beyond a cottage economy attempting feebly to major on the rustic charm of potholes and relaxed journey times.

If the dispersed major towns thrive, their prosperity will feed their immediate hinterlands.

The converse of this also needs to be looked at and accepted. If too many significant resources are deflected from the major towns to bring direct aid to their respective hinterlands, there can be no economic growth. The towns will decline and investment poured into the hinterlands will be wasted, unsustainable without the support of a stout urban infrastructure within reach.

In the case of the McAlpine proposal for Ardyne Point, were it to be approved in its entirety what is critical is less about its impact on its immediate locality than about its impact on Dunoon.

Dunoon does not need to feed yet more dispersed initiatives from its own slender central resources. (It has Innellan which should have first call on any resort development resources.) Dunoon needs to become a 21st century destination and business hub in its own right. When it reaches that target, its prosperity will feed employment, housing, transport infrastructure and new enterprise throughout Cowal.

As it stands, the McAlpine proposal cannot but take from existing and inadequate resources to develop Dunoon. The current road systems south of Dunoon are fit enough for their present purposes but would not remotely support construction traffic and, later, user traffic from the full proposed development at Ardyne Point.

Dunoon would hit double jeopardy. It would lose funding diverted to support what, if approved, is a private enterprise; and its own existing infrastructure, such as it is, would degrade faster in the press of usage delivering the development to its south.

What McAlpine proposes to create is a substantial new village with a large marina in a remote location and with a ferry link to the Isle of Bute. Were all of this to come about, it would simply skew the focus of Cowal more than its topography already does.

Cowal does not need another resort and a remote one at that. It needs Dunoon to work.

Sustainability and the McAlpine proposal

Assume a situation where the full development applied for has been built and is in operation. Who will live in the 220 planned flats and houses – and how will they live and work from there?

Economic sustainability

Without a thriving Dunoon to support commuting to work, such flats and houses are likely to be occupied only occasionally as second homes.

So where does this leave the viability of a 120 bed hotel and the retail outlets as other than seasonal operations? In our climate, marinas are not year round active businesses and without a Dunoon prosperous enough to support a healthy dormitory village, the shadow of Portavadie’s ghost village of Polphail cannot be banished.

On the occasions when the marina is active and the second homers are in residence, this development is not seriously going to benefit Dunoon. The yachties will use the hotel bar and restaurant and the retail outlets for supplies and repairs. The second homers will hop on the ferry to Rothesay rather than drive to Dunoon. Living on the water like this has more of the feel of a holiday than a haul up and down a road.

Even considering spending scarce public funds on supporting so peripheral, seasonal and uncertain a private investment creates cause for concern on the critieria applying at the Council’s Planning Committee level.

Environmetal sustainability

However, assume again that the proposal is approved, built and working as it is fantasised it might.

22o flats and houses are full and permanently occupied. Most of the residents too are permanently occupied. Their cars are constantly on the road as are the delivery vans that supply them. Bus services have been developed to support those with no cars or impaired ability to drive. Traffic from Dunoon and the north is constantly on the road south to Ardyne to take the ferry to Rothesay in Bute, met by northgoing traffic off the boat from Rothesay.

Carbon emissions, climate change and Scotland’s emissions targets – all negatively hit. And for what? Propping up McAlpine’s return on investment? Justify that.

Ferry services

In the matter of ferry services, several issues come into play, all pointing in the same direction and away from the specifics of the full McAlpine proposal. They are:

• environmental sustainability
• the regeneration of Dunoon
• direct transport links between Argyll’s major towns

Why send traffic to and through Dunoon to travel a further 12 miles by road just to take a ferry away from Cowal? The obvious answer is a vehicle and passenger ferry service direct between Dunoon and Rothesay, supporting business traffic throughout the year and visitor traffic in the holiday seasons.

This cuts carbon emissions; saves wasting money on road development to a remote residential location unused for most of the year; gives Dunoon an additional focus and function; makes business journeys and freight delivery more efficient; and provides a scenic service in its own right, with enough onboard time to support an earning cafeteria.

So what about the McAlpine proposal

There is a lot to commend the development of a marina at Ardyne Point, with appropriate and first class shoreside support facilities and a modest residential capacity for staff and holiday lets. But it would be seasonal and largely mothballed out of season.

A good marina here would support the development of the Clyde waterway as an activities destination and create seasonal water-borne relations between Rothesay and the southeast of Cowal. It would not require resources to be spent on  infrastructural development.

With a marina and pontoon facilties, it could realistically be anticipated that local enterprises would start up, providing seasonal passenger ferry services – perhaps carrying bicycles and facilitating walking,  between the Ardyne marina and Rothesay.

A constructive response to the current planning application would be to offer consent only for this sort of reduced development, with no infrastructural costs borne by Argyll and Bute Council – on a take it or leave it basis. Such a development is justifiable, sustainable, a constructive and appropriate contribution to the area.

And take it or leave it, get the long overdue restoration of the Ardyne area done.