Comment posted Crown Estate Commissioners hang on like limpets to Scottish rights by newsroom.
Fair comment. There is genuine expertise of long standing in those who work for the Crown Estate Commission. We hear favourable remarks on this on a regular basis.
newsroom also commented
- We doubt if anyone would see a departure from Charlotte Square as anything other than a corporate diminution – which was allied to a change in accounting practice,removing the previous separate accounting for the Scottish operation. Together these sketch an indicative story that needs to be told.
We take it that you are not suggesting that the Bells Brae Crown Estate Commission establishment remained identical in number and level in the aftermath of the move from Charlotte Square? You might care to detail both. - Thank you Andrew. We understood that they had produced separate accounts for Scotland but, in the early days after their decampment, they merged the accounts – although they did later move to disaggregate them in the way you describe.
Your Excel table sounds a very valuable exercise. When you’ve added the 2012 figures, if you would like to email the table to me (lm.henderson@powdermills.com) we could put it in pdf format and add it as an downloadable attachment to this article under your name – along with an explanatory paragraph from you. This wold make it universally available.
Lynda
Recent comments by newsroom
- Russell to make parliamentary statement on rural schools today
In the circumstances of the destructions of the SNP councillors group in the last 12 months, you can hardly expect credibility elevating the importance of ‘collective’ action?
Being ‘collective’ when it suits one to harvest support from others it not what collectivity or collegiality is about.
And many in Argyll now know more than enough about your party, its councillors, its members, its structures and its wonderfully elastic ‘rules’. - Russell to make parliamentary statement on rural schools today
This was a RESPONSE to a party political slanting of the issue – scoring points in an internal SNP turf war which should never have happened, was consciously manipulated, and has divided a party I voted for and was a member of until relatively recently – when I stopped my subscription in a mixture of anger, despair – and contempt – at what was and is – being done to hopes for better governance in Argyll and Bute.
You might also reflect upon the contradictions inherent in approving of For Argyll for being straight speaking when it suits one agenda and condemning it when what it says – equally objectively, is less comfortable. - Russell to make parliamentary statement on rural schools today
Don’t take this as an argument against rural schools – which it is not.
There is, though, a very real argument about the relative educational and social value of classes as small as one or two.
In being in favour of rural schools, it is still important not to lose sight of good judgement, Nothing is, per se, the right or wrong provision. There’s no formula. It’s a question of context – and there does have to be a point where the best use of available money really is an issue.
The issue centres on an honest examination and presentation of the facts – and of proposed solutions – by all concerned, with no cooking of the books and with due scrutiny to encourage integrity. - First Minister’s call for ‘grown up politics’ countered by order – from the top
What’s ROTFL, J? - Russell to make parliamentary statement on rural schools today
This is a shamefully mischievous argument designed to support the SNP party political line which the substantial majority of its own councillors – 9 out of 11 – reject; and to do so by fostering the division between Argyll and Bute’s four administrative areas that the drivers of the SNP civil war found it useful to create.
Trying to harden up the blame game on Helensburgh is another way of playing the man and not the argument.
The issue is whether political decisions are made for the good of Argyll and Bute as a whole – or in the traditional pic’n'mix disbursement of favours to particular areas, usually to the ones that shout loudest.
What we are now seeing is the move from the vicious demonising of individuals to the demonising of an entire area.
Helensburgh undoubtedly contributes substantially to Argyll – and if you would like to enter into and sustain a serious and informed debate on economics, let’s hear you.
Picking on Helensburgh with accusations of self-interested isolationism ignores utterly the situation where Dunoon is perfectly prepared to see elderly care throughout the rest of Argyll suffer, provided it can keep open a care home which for some time has had a single digit number of residents.
We have ALL to find the will to move beyond this entrenched self-centredness and act in the interests of the greater good.
With this nasty little comment, we appear to be looking at a political prospectus where the union within Argyll and Bute is every bit as unwelcome to SNP activists as is the union within the UK.
So if we keep on reducing the boundaries of the holy land, where will it stop? St Kilda? Now that really is the exemplar of why ‘ourselves alone’ is ultimately inadequate.
Eventually this frightful schismatism you display stops at the skin of the individual and amounts to nothing more than a self-satisfied, narcissistic campaign against everything beyond that personal border.
The best in life, at all levels, comes from teamwork – and no one imagines that teamwork is feel-good easy – just massively rewarding if you make it work.
It ought also to be noted that your own party hierarchy’s instruction to its locally elected representatives, actively removes the opportunity for the majority of Helensburgh councillors to ‘join in’ – unless, of course, your vision of ‘joining in’ is agreeing to what is promulgated in the SNP’s version of ‘the big house’, with plenty of cap doffing.
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Good to see that you are still pursuing and publishing on the Crown Estate. But one variation from the article. The Crown Estate’s Annual Report and Accounts do provide material for the whole UK under each of its main budget areas. Its Scottish Report provides data about Scottish income and expenditure under the same budget headings, so it is possible to analyse its performance in Scotland on its own and against the position for the UK as a whole. A year ago I created an Excel table to complete a Scottish/UK analysis and comparison for 2001 and 2011, and will update that with the 2012 figures – happy to provide that to anyone interested in the statistics if they e-mail me on: andrewmreid@btinternet.com;
andrew
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Thank you Andrew. We understood that they had produced separate accounts for Scotland but, in the early days after their decampment, they merged the accounts – although they did later move to disaggregate them in the way you describe.
Your Excel table sounds a very valuable exercise. When you’ve added the 2012 figures, if you would like to email the table to me (lm.henderson@powdermills.com) we could put it in pdf format and add it as an downloadable attachment to this article under your name – along with an explanatory paragraph from you. This wold make it universally available.
Lynda
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Pingback: Argyll News: Community Land Scotland see case for change to Crown Estate Commission ‘undiminished’ | For Argyll
While supporting the thinking that monies collected by the Crown Estate in Scotland should remain in Scotland and that administration of Scottish waters should be based in Scotland, I have concerns about what sort of body will replace the CEC should its powers be taken over.
As a seafarer and mooring holder, I dread to think what would happen if the likes of Argyll and Bute Council got hold of the rights to collect the rent. A system of sea bed administration which works well, however unfairly from a Scottish perspective, will be demolished at a stroke to be replaced by inept, short term political greed – seeing every mooring as a cash cow. Chaos and anarchy would ensue as rents would be unpaid, moorings laid anywhere without control and there would be a complete lack of policing. The cash cow would quickly become a burden to the council tax payer.
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Fair comment. There is genuine expertise of long standing in those who work for the Crown Estate Commission. We hear favourable remarks on this on a regular basis.
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It would be interesting to know what happens in places like Norway or the Aland islands, where the pattern of activity in coastal waters must be similar to that in Argyll.
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Not sure if this is usefull to the discusion or not but in Dundee control of the shore was handed to the local council who then upped the rent local sailing clubs were paying for their slipways by around 400%.
Tony Gill raises a very good point and I dread to think what would happen if the councils were given control of the seabed as well.
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Pingback: Argyll News: Correctionlon on ‘reforms’ to Crown Estate Commission Scottish operation | For Argyll
I do think it matters if responsible jounalists get their facts right when writing critical articles of this nature. The Crown Estate Office in Edinburgh has never been closed. It merely moved premises from Charlotte Square to Bells Brae in 2003. True some functions -control of the urban estate-moved to London but that is an entirely different matter.
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We doubt if anyone would see a departure from Charlotte Square as anything other than a corporate diminution – which was allied to a change in accounting practice,removing the previous separate accounting for the Scottish operation. Together these sketch an indicative story that needs to be told.
We take it that you are not suggesting that the Bells Brae Crown Estate Commission establishment remained identical in number and level in the aftermath of the move from Charlotte Square? You might care to detail both.
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I’m looking forward to a continuation of the story. I must admit when I formulated a reply to the Crown estate Consultation on behalf of the Scottish Islands Federation, which is available in full as a book and as far as I know online, the conclusion I drew is that although the Crown estate where perhaps not fully transparent, the formation of an independent Scottish advisory board to act according to Existing Scottish law on behalf of Scottish people. I mean people who are perhaps retired but who have a great knowledge of the various subjects to be considered, particularly maritime affairs, but who are independent of businesses. In September the Scottish Islands Federation (SIF) are hosting the AGM of the European Small Islands Network (ESIN) on Mull so we could gather together information on how it’s done elsewhere. The independent islands seem to be more empowered. Unfortunately local authorities have often disempowered local coastal inhabitants.
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Your article stated quite clearly that the Crown Estate had shut its Edinburgh Office. Why can’t you admit you were wrong instead of trying to muddy the waters? Who cares where their office is so long as they have one and as for staff numbers they like many other organisations have flucuated through the years.
You make some perfectly reasonable points in your article and then spoil it with a lack of balance.Why not mention some positive points? Without the Crown Estate fish farming would never have seen the light of day in Scotland and many fragile West Coast communities would have died along with the deep sea fishing industry. Secondly the tenanted farms on the Crowns’s rural holdings are the best equipped anywhere in Scotland as any visitor to Glenlivet or Fochabers will tell you.But you don’t want your readers to know that do you?
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