Meeting of the Parliament 15 January 2015
Thank you very much. It was an interesting illustration of the fact that people in urban areas do not really understand what it is like to live in far-flung communities. I represent many such communities; the largest settlement has 9,000 people in it. The point is that most people live in much smaller settlements.
With regard to the Tory amendment about working with services in other parts of the UK, the point that I was making about the BBC is that the BBC controls broadcasting, and it has been making the cuts. We need those services to be reinstated and increased in our areas. I hope that it is recognised that we do work with services in other parts of the UK and that it would be a good idea if the services from there worked with us. That would be very helpful indeed.
The radio situation was exacerbated by a transmitter fault, so there was no local radio service in the Highlands or in Orkney for two or three days. I do not know what the cause of it was but of course it happened just at the time of year when we are in the middle of the blizzards and the great storms. That is an example of where infrastructure needs to be resilient to meet such conditions.
My final thought is about our seafarers. Mention was made by Hugh Henry of the terrible deaths at the edge of the Pentland Firth due to the loss of the Cemfjord. A local fisherman sent me a note about it. He said that, with his 40 years of experience in the Pentland Firth, with those terrible waters that people can never know enough about to feel safe, he thought that there should be more broadcasts—every hour—particularly when there was a major east wind coming towards the Pentland Firth, because dozens of people have died in the firth over the years. That shows that we have to think about how we provide emergency services. We support the emergency personnel—all of them—but we should be able to do more to help them to do their jobs when they need to.
16:07