Meeting of the Parliament 04 March 2026 [Draft]
I am grateful to the Liberal Democrats for bringing this important debate to the chamber, because Scotland’s island and coastal communities deserve much better. I will focus on a specific injustice that often goes unmentioned: the cost of freight. I acknowledge and appreciate the comments that the cabinet secretary made in her opening remarks.
We often talk about passenger fares, and rightly so. However, for our island and coastal communities, the real inequality bites with the cost of transporting freight on Scotland’s ferries—and that is when those ferries run at all. Put simply, the cost of ferry freight adds roughly 30 per cent to the cost of building a home on our islands; that is not a rounding error but a structural injustice that is baked into island life.
Yesterday, in the chamber, my colleague Ariane Burgess highlighted the stark disparity in pricing. Large motorhomes can cross by ferry at about the quarter of the cost of a truck that brings building materials, food or other essential goods that communities depend on. Across the network, commercial fares are far higher than those for motorhomes.
However, the disparity is inconsistent. On the Oban to Craignure and Lochaline to Fishnish routes to Mull, commercial fares are three times higher than those for motorhomes. For Tiree, they are 22 per cent higher; for Barra, 27 per cent higher. Why is the fare for a heavy goods vehicle that is heading to Mull three times the price of that for a motorhome, while to Arran—a similar distance—it is only twice as expensive? That makes no sense, and it is not fair.
That is not just a logistical or accounting problem but an equalities issue, and it is fuelling depopulation across our islands. Scotland faces a housing emergency, and island communities are in no way exempt. In many ways, they bear its full weight. When the cost of building materials is inflated simply because of freight charges, affordable housing becomes almost impossible. Councils, community housing enablers and housing associations cannot deliver at the scale that communities need.
The result is that people are living in unsuitable homes, waiting lists are growing and homelessness is rising. That disproportionately affects women, people on low incomes and young people who are trying to stay in the communities that they grew up in, as Rhoda Grant has already alluded to.
The ferry freight system is not neutral. It concentrates disadvantage. We cannot seriously address depopulation or the housing emergency in Scotland’s islands while those freight charges remain unreformed.
High freight charges ripple through the cost of every staple good: food, healthcare supplies and energy. Island residents are paying more than their mainland counterparts, and people with disabilities face particular hardship when medical equipment, mobility aids or care supplies are subject to inflated freight costs. There is, in effect, a postcode lottery for basic human needs, and that should be unacceptable in 21st century Scotland.
So, what do we want? Scottish Greens have been calling on the Scottish Government to commit to a review of commercial freight charges. The review must aim to apply a fair, pro rata charge for vehicles; remove the punitive costs that currently apply to commercial traffic; consider the impact on housing delivery so that we confront the 30 per cent premium that makes island house building unnecessarily difficult; and reform pricing structures to reflect social need—just as passenger fares have been reformed—and examine the equality impacts on island communities.
Scotland’s island communities are not peripheral—they are central to who we are. We will not retain vibrant, equitable communities if we allow freight charges to price out affordable housing and small businesses, and widen inequality year after year. That is just one element of ferries infrastructure and strategy that we need to change and get right.
A review of freight charges is needed, and I am grateful to the cabinet secretary for confirming today that that review will happen later this year.