Date with destiny for Machrihanish Airbase Community Company

On Wednesday 14th July, Kintyre’s Machrihanish Airbase Community Company (MACC) has been invited to discussions with two senior Scottish Government officials on the company’s plans to buy the former RAF site for the community.

This will be a telling meeting in very many ways.

A marked phenomenon of the community drive to acquire and develop this asset to support a sustainable community has been the, at best, lukewarm response to the initiative  of those who should be putting weight behind it: local and national government.

In what was effectively a local referendum, MACC achieved a stunning result in the Community Ballot it was legally required to hold to test responses to the proposals. 67.35% of the electorate voted and of that vote, 97.4% voted YES to the buy out.

MACC has been consistently responsible in what it has done, promising the community that it will only buy the base if it can come up with a realistic and sustainable business plan – which it can do.

An issue here, which MACC expects to feature in Wednesday’s discussions, is the impossibly short timescale given them to produce such a plan – against a serious lack of critical information which would shape its direction.

A less confident and surefooted team would have been pressured – panicked even – into cobbling together such a business plan just to meet what is an artificially imposed and unnecessary deadline – as well as an unreasonable one.

MAC know full well that were it to do so, the inevitable incompetence of a business plan produced in such circumstances would be used in evidence against them.The company is refusing to commit itself to the final development of the business plan until they are in possession of all the necessary facts and have time to consider and respond to their import.

It does have an indicative plan to show the nature of its thinking. It is very much to MACC’s credit – and a reassurance as to its capabilities, that it has not fallen for the trap of – possibly deliberately manufactured – over anxiety and pressure to deliver on this.

The site is a highly complex one and absolutely nothing to do with it is straightforward. There are very serious issues yet t be resolved. We have documented much of this in a four-part investigative series we published quite recently: Machrihanish Airbase: minefield of nightmares.

What’s the game?

Central to this whole issue is one of fair play. MACC has already successfully held Scotland’s biggest ever Community Ballot – with the biggest ever positive outcome. If they get the support to go ahead and buy the site, it will be Scotland’s biggest community buy out since the ‘community right to buy’ measure was introduced in the 2003 Land Reform Act Scotland.

For Campbeltown and Kintyre, long regarded – with reason – as a depressed area, to be showing this sort of energetic ambition and capacity building should be drawing the support of all political parties and its local council.

• This is the independent entrepreneurship in action that the SNP administration in Scotland wants to see as evidence of a Scotland that can, should it wish, thrive alone.
• This is a big move towards the small government that the current UK coalition government of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats want to bring about.
• This is the action of people taking control of their circumstances that must warm the cockles of every core Labourite.
• This is the company that will clean up a seriously polluted site in the interests of public health and environmental safety.

Jim Mather, Argyll’s MSP and Minister for Enterprise, Energy and Tourism has been supportive. His support will be crucial as the initiaive progresses.

Otherwise, in central and local government, where there should have been the most committed support for a community company growing virtually daily in self-belief and capability, there has been little beyond fine words and actual obstructionism.

The Scottish Government challenged the results of the Community Ballot in a fully surreal document listing 31 largely nit-picking questions with qualifying riders and requests for additional material.  This made it seem as if the result was suspect rather than the triumphant assertion of community will that it was.

We would be interested to know whether other community ballots held in association with the community right to buy have had similar experiences. If they have, we are not aware of them.

We understand that, when challenged on this strange document, the defence offered by the Scottish Government was that it was taking this action in case the Ministry of Defence, the vendor, challenged the result of the ballot. The MoD did not do so and it would have been odd indeed had it done.

We have ourselves, from material we have received from the Scottish Government’s Transport Department and from the Ministry of Defence under Freedom of Information legislation, uncovered evidence of a tacit opposition to the community buy out between the MoD and the Scottish Government’s civil servants – for reasons unknown.

Has the curious lack of unequivocal support for MACC been a case of the ‘Yes Ministe’r cart driving a pre-occupied horse – or supporting it in the direction it covertly wishes to see taken?

Either way, there is more to come from the  Freedom of Information material we have obtained and we are holding our fire should it be necessary to use it. We are watching developments with forensic interest and eyes wide open to the range of private sector vested interests operating in the shadows – and to the possibilities of deals done.

The HIAL manoeuvre – or was it a Heimlich manoeuvre?

Another matter MACC expects to come up in Wednesday’s discussions is the MoD’s insistence on scrambling through – during the sale period -  a new, more advantageous and long-term lease of Campbeltown Airport, part of the site under disposal, for HIAL (Highlands and Islands Airports Ltd).

The MoD persisted in doing this against the known wishes of MACC and against its sustained campaign asking the MoD to issue only an interim licence, giving HIAL some security while leaving room for the new owner to considered the options.

It is public knowledge that MACC does not want HIAL as the operator of Campbeltown – for sound business reasons. HIAL has virtually killed off the potentially lucrative private flying market that MACC would have wished to see develop – and which is very  much to the advantage of this remote but beautiful place, with two world class golf courses, determined to grow its business base

We suspect that closing down this particular business development option was a manoeuvre by the MoD to put MACC off the purchase – to expel the wish from them by reflexive response (hence the question of whether it was a Heimlich manoeuvre).

Either way, this does not grace the track record of HIAL nor of the Scottish Government’s inept Transport Department, which is complicit in the manoeuvre.

It does raise issues as to whether MACC  would consider letting the airport be excluded from the sale, as dealing with HIAL, given the history between them, aggravated by the controversial issuing of the new lease, would have its difficulties Their concern would be the restrictions HIAL would place upon their potential use of the airfield.

Our gut feeling is that letting the airport go may well be a desired endgame elsewhere and that MACC should simply go ahead and acquire the full site as offered for sale. With MACC as owner of the lease, HIAL will be equally concerned about restrictions and this mutual tension creates room and need for constructive compromise.

MACC’s advisers

MACC considers itself fortunate to have been able to raise the funding to employ a very good firm of consultants to work with them on developing the business plan – and pending the release of all necessary information, preparatory work is well under way.

The consultants are DTZ and MACC also has WSP group as its advisers on contamination and liability issues. Their solicitors are TC Young.

WSP has significant experience of MoD disposals and as a UK partner in the global WSP Group, it provides integrated management and consultancy services to all aspects of the built and natural environment, ranging from management, engineering and from planning to environmental advice. It s an ideal choice for this particular purchase.

And Wednesday?

In overall terms MACC is prepared for continuing pressure from the MoD to try to force it to complete a purchase before serious outstanding issues have been resolved. It is unimpressed by such transparent manoeuvres and sufficiently sussed to be aware of the motives behind them. It will not be moved.

It is, from its experience of previous form, braced for an unhelpful and possibly aggressive set of discussions on Wednesday with the civil servants. It is waiting for supercilious questioning on:

• its ability to take on such a large project
• the sustainability of its outline business plan
• issues on possible handover dates from the MoD
• and, of course, HIAL, with its own nationalised embeddedness in the Scottish Govenrnment’s Transport Department.

It will not be moved by these either.

The issue – private or community development?

The site could be broken up and sold to a series of cherry-picking private interests. This would leave unwanted and unproductive areas fallow and derelict for the disadvantage of the area while the privateers made money.

The experience at Machrihanish of opportunistic private development – like Peter Blacker’s Anglohouse Scotland company’s Sound of Kintyre Homes – has been far from encouraging and signals what might be expected.

Anglohouse bought disused airmen’s houses on the site from the MoD, refurbished them, did some infill building and arranged a contract with the MD to supply water and sewage services to the houses from the site’s systems, paid by the factors he installed who would bill the homeowners.

In January 2009 Blacker took Anglohouse Scotland into administration, without notifying the MoD, the factors or the homeowners and, in the process, voiding the contract with the Mod for the essential services in question.

This action left the Mod to continue supply on a grace and favour basis until it can hand over responsibility for whatever the future supply may be to the eventual owner of the site. It has left the homeowners unable to sell their homes, with potential buyers unable to raise a mortgage on them since there are no guaranteed water and sewage services to the properties.

This is the sort of behaviour and the value set informing fast-buck, profit-taking private development that Kintyre can expect to see more of should the site be disposed of in this way.

And it is worth saying that the appearance of the Sound of Kintyre Homes has not stood up particularly well during the relatively short time of their existence in this form, suggesting a priority on the cosmetic rather than on the durable.

MAC, as a community company dedicated to sustainable development in the area, will need to make the site earn money  – and we are confident that it will do so – but will not be profit driven to the extent of the social irresponsbility that characterises the privateer and has been exemplified by the Anglohouse Scotland saga.

We look forward to witnessing a Damascene conversion on the part of the Scottish Government’s civil service, of the Government itself, of the MoD and of Argyll and Bute Council in making manifest their committed support for this admirable community company and the community initiative and will that drives it forwards.