Meeting of the Parliament 15 January 2015
Although I join colleagues in praising the work of the emergency services, I want to take a slightly different view, particularly on the way in which we cope with extreme weather. It is my fundamental belief that we can help the emergency services by not being so unprepared. The emergency services often have much more to do because of people who are unable to cope with conditions that this country, and areas such as my constituency, often have to deal with.
For example, I heard on the radio this morning about some people whose car was stuck near Blair Atholl for nine hours. They described having only a bottle of water that was for the windscreen wash and not wearing any warm clothes. In the past few days, the weather forecast has been very clear about driving conditions in Drumochter and on many other routes. I say “Be prepared”—I used to be a scout—and, let us face it, many people need to be much more prepared.
The ambulance services in far-flung areas such as mine do sterling work that often involves far longer journeys. We hear that people in the cities are very concerned about the number of minutes that it takes to get to a major hospital. In our case, it is often a matter of hours, unless one is lucky enough to get a helicopter. We must ensure that our emergency services are resilient and able to fulfil their purpose. I have a lot of belief in our investment in the ambulance service in particular.
There are other services that we take for granted, such as Scottish Water, which can require electric pumps to keep the system going. That is why Scottish Water needs emergency equipment for when there is a power cut. It was put to me by someone from Skye that it was bad enough to be without electricity for three days, but if the water had gone off as well, it would have made life fairly intolerable. Fortunately, that did not happen. However, it is essential that our infrastructure is such that we do not have the kind of emergencies in which water bottles have to be distributed to far-flung communities through terrible conditions of snow and blizzards.
I asked some of my constituents about their experiences in the past week. The answers that I received back up my argument about needing to be prepared. For example, Shirley Munro, who lives in Easter Ross, said:
“My thought is it would be really good if local radio gave out more regular informative and accurate information, given the updates online are useless if you have no power and probably not mobile reception either. These blackouts sadly will happen now and then, and I am grateful for those who work in often dangerous situations to get our power back on”.
Hear, hear.
The thing is that the BBC has cut the staff who do the journalism that provides us with the information. It has also cut the local bulletins in size. Because the power cuts are often in the areas with the poorest broadband coverage, people need a battery-operated or wind-up radio to get a service. As Shirley Munro says, as soon as the electricity goes off, so does people’s access to the internet. The radio tells us, from a nice, warm studio in Glasgow, that we should look up our electricity provider’s website. Get real. We need to find ways to ensure that people get the information. The only way is through local radio provision, and the BBC has a major role to play in that respect.