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MSP Rhoda Grant hits out at plans to centralise Highland air traffic control services in Inverness


By Gregor White

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Inverness Airport.
Inverness Airport.

Highlands MSP Rhoda Grant has branded plans to centralise the region's air traffic control a "vanity project".

In a debate in the Scottish Parliament today on Mrs Grant said the plans would cause harm to the air traffic controllers, their families and the economic ecosystem of vulnerable rural communities.

Campaigning against the plans since 2017 she said: "The overwhelming feeling from staff currently employed is that most of them are wholeheartedly against the centralisation plan, but clauses in the contracts of new staff over the last couple of years have made provision for relocation from local airfields to Inverness in the future, showing that the decision was taken some time ago without proper consultation, or an Islands Impact Assessment.

"We are being told that an Islands Impact Assessment will be done, but the contract is already out to tender.

"Benbecula and Wick are already being downgraded.

"The decision has been made and they are treating this as a tick box exercise, it’s a farce."

MSP Rhoda Grant.
MSP Rhoda Grant.

She added: "Staff have put forward alternative proposals for safe and cost-effective modernisation which retains local skills, jobs and infrastructure, but there is no evidence that these have ever been considered.

"Highlands and Islands Airports Limited (HIAL) invested time and money recruiting and training local staff; people vested in their communities who wanted to live there.

"They are now throwing that away – a slap in the face to the communities they purport to serve.

"Staff who have invested their hearts and souls in local communities are now being forced to consider moving for employment and giving up their homes. The personal cost is already proving too much.

"Everyone who lives on these islands, and in the remote parts of Scotland, knows the problems of poor internet, electricity and communication infrastructures.

"For remote towers to work there needs to be very reliable digital connectivity. Normally four separate connections to provide security.

"The reality is that in some of these airports there is not one adequate digital link, far less four independent ones.

"This vanity project needs to be stopped now, before it causes irrevocable harms to Scotland’s communities."

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