Meeting of the Parliament 16 June 2015
I would like to start by outlining the theory behind the Harbours (Scotland) Bill, which is a concise and necessary piece of legislation.
The main purpose of the bill is to remove from the Scottish ministers the power to require trust ports to bring forward proposals for privatisation. For clarity, a trust port is a port that has no shareholders or owners and at which any surplus revenue is invested back in the port. Without the bill, the reclassification by the Office for National Statistics of trust ports with a minimum annual turnover of £9 million as public corporations would have resulted in some trust ports being forced into privatisation against their best interests and against the desire of their stakeholders. At the time of the bill’s scrutiny by the Infrastructure and Capital Investment Committee, Lerwick Port Authority and Peterhead Port Authority had trust ports that met the £9 million criterion, which meant that they would have been required to bring forward proposals for their privatisation as a result of ONS reclassification, despite the fact that neither had expressed a desire to be privatised.
The bill is a necessary piece of legislation that will stop forced privatisation of a port simply because it has an annual turnover of £9 million or more. Private is not always best, and it would be ridiculous if a port that had no desire to be privatised were to be forced into becoming so against its best interests and against the desire of its stakeholders.
Scottish ports are fundamental to the economy. That is highlighted by the fact that in 2006 ports in Scotland handled 102 million tonnes of freight, which represented 17 per cent of the UK’s total freight for the year. That is equivalent to 21 tonnes of freight per person in Scotland—almost three times the figure for England. In 2006, it was revealed that port and harbour-related activity including cargo handling and storage, warehousing, and ship repair and construction directly affected 18,000 jobs in Scotland.
I emphasise that ports in Scotland are of particular importance because they play a unique role in connecting communities and handle more than 10 million passenger movements each year. The trust port at Lerwick is a model example that illuminates the successes and benefits of the current system of trust ports in Scotland. Lerwick’s modern ferry terminal has made an important contribution to the doubling of annual passenger numbers to around 133,000. The ferry provides overnight services to and from Aberdeen on the Scottish mainland, and it also calls at Kirkwall in Orkney.
Finally, I reiterate that it is necessary to pass the Harbours (Scotland) Bill and to make it law in order to ensure that thriving trust ports are not forced, because of the ONS’s reclassifying decision, into a process of privatisation against their best interests and the desire of their stakeholders. I welcome the apparent consensus across the chamber on this important bill.