Argyll & Bute Council has launched the Loch Fyne Management Plan, completed after the consultation process and now to be adopted in Planning Guidance. It will guide the use and development of the coastal zone of Loch Fyne over the next five years.

Mapping initiative

In an interesting and creative development, Council staff have used its LocalView online mapping system to create a map for Loch Fyne that lets people zoom in and out,viewing the loch in different scales. It also shows different activities and interests in specific locations; and separate layers of information that have shaped the plan’s policies and recommendations – aquaculture, for example.

Visiting the Council’s website here will let you view the plan and the screen this link opens has the link to the LocalView map of Loch Fyne.

This is a superb resource. It doesn’t come out to meet you, so to speak, in the sense of instantly providing what it anticipates you might want. You have to use it – to go looking for information on it that you want to have. It will reward use.

The welcome for the Loch Fyne Plan

The full name of the plan is the Loch Fyne Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) Plan and it is focused on Scotland’s longest and deepest sea loch.

Keep that description in mind, alongside Councillor Robert Macintyre’s words at the launch. Councillor Macintyre is Depute Leader of the Council and its Spokesperson for Economy, Environment and Rural Affairs. Welcoming the launch of the Plan, he said:

‘The coastal area of Argyll and Bute is one of our prime assets. It provides a unique resource from which present and future economic, social, and environmental well-being can be derived.

‘It is a living and working environment, home to a large proportion of our population, and hosts a great diversity of industrial and recreational activities, each playing an important role in the area’s economy’.

Putting some salient points together:

• Loch Fyne is Scotland’s longest and deepest sea loch.
• It sweeps the Clyde coast of Mid Argyll.
• It is ‘one of Argyll’s prime assets’.
• It supports present and ‘future economic, social, and environmental well-being’.
• ‘It is a living and working environment’.
• ‘It is home to a large proportion of our population’.
• It ‘hosts a great diversity of industrial and recreational activities’.

This testifies to two core points:

• The life of and on the loch is central to the life of the areas it serves – one of the main areas being Mid Argyll.
• Use of the loch is central to the economic and recreational development of the area, which are themselves interrelated.

All of this is well found, optimistic, inspirational even.

The missing link: local health and safety

Now here’s the missing link.

The development of working, living and playing on Loch Fyne necessary to well-being and economic development raises major health and safety issues – at the heart of which is being able to swim.

Lochgilphead is Argyll’s  county town and the main town in Mid Argyll. It lies on Loch Gilp, an inlet of Loch Fyne and curving west above it is the famous and deep Crinan Canal. Virtually linked to Lochgilphead and part of a single community of interest is Ardrishaig, with a sailing club and the Clyde entrance to the Crinan Canal which cuts through to the Sound of Jura on the Atlantic coast.

Lochgilphead hosts one of only two community-owned swimming pools in Argyll – built with money raised by the community, operated for the community by community members through its Board – and left to twist in the wind of an inevitable operating deficit by a Council which subsidises all other pools in Argyll to a significantly higher degree.

This pool has seen generations of Mid Argyll’s young folk learn to swim. Many are now taking their own toddlers to start the same journey to personal safety and confidence in a world living by water. Local watersports clubs – like sailing, kayaking and diving cannot accept members who are unable to swim.

Rather than admit that, for historical reasons, a highly inequitable situation has arisen in Council support for one community’s fundamental health and safety in its given environment, the Council has got itself stuck in attempting to defend the indefensible.

This means that its objective has become distorted.

It seems not to be focused on a just outcome and on ensuring that Mid Argyll’s residents are given the same physical survival chances as the other areas served by a public swimming pool.

It seems to be fixated on giving as little revenue support as possible as if, in some weird way, that outcome would testify to the original rightness of the wrong – if you follow the drift.

All it has been offering is an extension of credit by paying more advance tranches of the current inadequate subsidy. Yet the Council must know as well as any household, that living on – and extending – tick is a recipe for bankruptcy. This tactic is the height of fiscal irresponsibility and is essentially an act of bad faith.

Highlights of the Council’s fiscal trail

This is the Council that ran an ill-advised ‘competition’ for regeneration money between its major towns. It spent a fortune in consultancy fees for the contentious exercise – only to waste the lot in a last minute climb-down which saw it give all the towns the money they were looking for.

This is the Council which oversaw the letting of a contract for the Lochgilphead High School.  This proved to be as fragile in its formation as was the roof of the school, torn off shortly after opening. It was then left in that state for long over a year, with part of the building unusable, while contractual disputes over financial responsibility continued.

This is the Council which oversaw a major physical revision of the harbour at Port Askaig on Islay. Against informed local advice, it persisted with a design for the new slipway to service the little car and passenger ferry which shuttles across the Sound of Islay to Feolin on the sister Isle of Jura. The new steep slipway proved dangerous for the ferry to use at certain points of the tide in the fast flowing Sound, threatening to unseat half loaded vehicles with their passengers on board. This situation saw the ferry compelled to use the linkspan provided for the big CalMac car ferry to Islay. For a considerable period, until Calmac changed their overnight berthing schedules to help, the island was left without emergency nighttime medical evacuation. There is no revision of the slipway for the Jura ferry in sight for a very long time.

This is also the Council that improperly used anti-terrorist legislation to monitor its social housing residents.

This is not a bad Council. It has made mistakes and it has now foolishly dug itself into a trench over its support for the Mid Argyll Pool. It has made real strides in raising its game. Yes, the bar was pretty low but the will to improve and the successes are encouraging. It has developed a profile for Argyll in Europe in the important renewable energy field.

But all in all, this is a Council with fences to mend and more defensible procedures to embed.

The obvious solution

It’s Christmas. There’s a new year coming up. No one is interested in hammering the Council for inherited problems. This would be a good time simply to put right a very real wrong, gracefully.

It would cost the council £35,000 to pay off the new and vigorous Board of the Mid Argyll Pool’s remaining £10,000 inherited debt and its projected operating loss for this year of £25,000. It would cost it an additional £30,000 per annum to give the Mid Argyll community-owned pool parity with its sister community-owned pool on Islay.

There are other campaigns with strong and far-sighted cases building up steam – we instance the need for an all-weather pitch for Campbeltown and the retention of Castle Toward in Cowal in the public sector as an outdoor education centre.

The Council will have real and legitimate fights on its hands on these and other issues. Better to settle an historic wrong in Mid Argyll than to add needlessly to the number of fronts on which it is engaged.

The photographs above – both cropped – are:

• top, of the Quay at Otter ferry on Loch Fyne, the longest and deepest sea loch in Scotland, by copyright holder Patrick Mackie, reproduced here under the GNU Free Documentation licence;
  
• of a yacht on on passage through the beautiful deep and steep-sided Crinan Canal, by copyright holder Velela, reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.
  

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