Ardyne Point development – white hope or white elephant?

Argyll & Bute Council has approved Sir Robert McAlpine’s development plans for the site of the former oil rig construction yard his company still owns at Ardyne Point in Cowal.

The plans will see a 220-berth marina, 220 housing units, some in flats and some up to 4-bedroom  houses, 60,000 sq ft of office space, a hotel, a ferry terminal for Western Ferries to run a service to and from Bute and – the other side of the picture – a waste water treatment plant.

Work is now to start in January and will begin by clearing the debris of the industrial site that McAlpine’s were contractually obliged to do as soon as they abandoned the oil rig construction site. Argyll & Bute council have never held them to that obligation. In our view this was negligent. Such weak treatment of large corporations simply embeds their distance from any sense of corporate social responsibility. Argyll reaps what its Council sows.

While the plans themselves have their superficial attractions there are underlying issues which give cause for concern and make the foundations for the approval given to the proposal hard to understand.

The plans are for a development in isolation – yet they include 220 residential units in a remote place, some with 4 bedrooms. In the remote location that is Ardyne, this means at least 220 cars which at some times of the hear, can all be expected to be present at the same time.

There is to be a ferry terminal from Bute which will not only be used as a facility for access to Ardyne and to Rothesay. It will be a point of mutual access for the Cowal peninsula (and adjoining areas, including Greenock) and the Isle of Bute.

Both of these factors will bring road usage north to Dunoon way in excess of the current pattern in volume and tonnage.

If the Ardyne development is to make sense, there will obviously be very significant infrastructural costs which will certainly not be borne by McAlpine’s. How does the Council propose to fund the necessary infrastructural provision when its funding leaves it unable to fulfill its current responsibilities?

The plan also make provision for creating roads within the development which will be ‘to adoptable standard’.  This makes the game clear. The timescale is not a long one either. McAlpine’s have said that they want to have sold off all the opportunities of the development and be clear away in 4-5 years. So the Council is looking to accept responsibility for these internal roads within that timescale. Another addition to the strains on an already inadequate budget.

And will Scottish Water, with Argyll & Bute Council  as one of its major public sector clients, be commissioned by the Council to provide the Waste Water Treatment plants – for foul and surface water – which are to discharge into Loch Striven?

Beyond the infrastructural cost questions, there are other difficulties which reduce the likelihood of the site becoming the roaring success which would be the only adequate defence of this naive decision by the Council.

The site is an exposed one, with heavy onshore winds. This will impact upon the usability of the marina and could render shorefront housing units far from outgoing and cosy in bad weather.

The site and the current access road are liable to flooding. The site’s current shoreline is supported by sheet steel piles and rip-rap stone. While this will keep some but, from the evidence of McAlpine’s own flood risk assessment, not all tidal flooding at bay, it is not a visual feature likely to make the residential units fly off the shelves.

In order to keep floor levels above the highest predicted flood tide with storm surges, they are to be set at around 5.05 metres. what will this look like?

The access road is known locally to flood in bad weather conditions. This too will depress sales.

Ardyne is essentially a holiday development which, with the right infrastructural support and the right weather, is in a fabulous position for such a purpose.

The problems here are that:

• the Council will find it hard to justify the inevitable use of the public purse to provide infrastructural support for the development – and in the current circumstances which will be longstanding.
• it will be equally hard to justify the pubic sector providing the infrastructure to allow a private company – Sir Robert McAlpine – to achieve the return on its investment at Ardyne. The fact that McAlpine was prepared to get this return by opening Cowal and the Clyde waterway to real environmental risk provides a sharp little contextual note. The company had previously proposed using the site to decommission redundant nuclear submarines but concerted and persistent public objection – rather than the Council – saw that one off. As we have said before, it is conceptually uninformed for the public sector to feel an obligation to help a private company out when an investment does not come up to expectations. It’s called risk.
• no one can fix the weather or the prevailing wind direction for Ardyne.

Would you invest in a flat or a house there?

So, for Cowal, will Ardyne be a white hope with McAlpine’s the white knight; or will it be a white elephant for Argyll? Take your pick. The jury’s out – but we’ll be monitoring developments.

Update 24th November: we noticed that McAlpine’s had asaid that there were some outstanding legal issues to be tidied up before they started work. An enquiry to the Council on the nature of these legalities produced the following information.

‘The Council has resolved to grant planning permission in principle (formerly known as outline permission) subject to the prior conclusion of a legal agreement with the applicant to secure off-site road improvements, namely:

• Extension to existing speed limit to capture the access point to the site;
• Footway to be provided along the public road from the site access to Toward Primary School;
• Some carriageway widening on the C class road back to the point where it becomes an A road at Toward.

‘All works are to be implemented at the applicant’s expense’.

Here’s an interesting link – Secret Scotland – with some historical perspectives.