It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Havant (Alan Mak) on securing the debate. It is a rare and welcome opportunity to discuss island issues. The hon. Gentleman said that we are all islanders. I am doubly blessed in that regard, because I am an islander
by birth—I was born and brought up on Islay, off the west coast—and I am an islander by choice, having raised my family with my wife in Orkney. I have represented Orkney and Shetland here since 2001.
It is worth reflecting on what it means to be an islander and to live in an island community. Island communities are special places. Being an islander changes the way people see the world. One of my great bugbears is hearing people talk about insularity, meaning that islanders are somehow inward-looking. In fact, islanders are much more outward-looking, because they are dependent on their links with the rest of the world in a way that people in the larger conurbations on the mainland take for granted. To be an islander is not to be insular, however much that might offend the classicists, but to lead a different sort of life in a modern and connected world.
We are often excluded. Hon. Members have heard me speak before on the subject of all too often being excluded from or charged extra for deliveries that people in towns and cities take for granted. However, I do not want this speech to be a constant litany of the problems that island communities face. If nothing else, I hope the Minister takes away from the debate an understanding that our island communities have challenges, as every community in the country does, but we offer opportunities for the Government as well. Island communities can contribute in a whole range of ways to the work of Government, be it in Westminster, Holyrood or wherever else.
Many of the issues that we face as island communities are shared in common with communities across the whole country. Brexit is probably the dominant issue that I hear about when I speak to businesses in my communities. Orkney is a predominantly agricultural community and Shetland is a predominantly fishing-based community, where fishing still makes up about one third of the local economy. The shape of our future relationship with Europe—particularly in relation to the fishing industry and whether we will continue to have a relationship with Brussels and a common policy on fisheries, and the shape of future agricultural support, which is guaranteed only to 2022—is a big issue for our economy.
That highlights one of the biggest problems. As can be seen from the number of hon. Members present, there are not that many island communities in this country and we do not have that high a level of population, so we often fall off the end of the table because we need a slightly different provision and our island needs are not always understood. We are the most vulnerable to the law of unintended consequences.
Post-Brexit, as we move to reformed agricultural and fisheries policies, there are real opportunities to design them in a way that will work for farmers and fisherman across the whole country, and to build into them the flexibility that we have been denied over the years, which has been enormously detrimental to our fleet and the fishing industry.
The economic profile of most island communities is not dissimilar from that of Orkney and Shetland. We have an economy of predominantly locally grown small and medium-sized enterprises. For islands, as for all small communities, that is a good thing with real opportunities. It allows us to keep a lot of the money that we raise and spend within the island community.
The modern economy in our island communities, however, is a lot more than the farmers and fishermen that hon. Members might instinctively think of. In my constituency, I have several growing and successful software engineering companies. They offer well-paid and attractive employment opportunities to younger people who may have been away for higher education and want to return.
There is a role for Government, not just in terms of the economic development and growth of those companies, but in terms of the provision of infrastructure. One of the main hindrances to the economy in my constituency is the continuing poor level of broadband and mobile phone connectivity. The latter is slowly improving, but as the rest of the country looks towards 5G, most of my constituents can still only dream of 3G or 4G.
A different approach from the Government to rolling out that sort of infrastructure could be transformative for us. If we said to the big corporates such as BT, “Of course you can get a licence to roll out the next generation in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, London, Birmingham or wherever else, but you have to start at the periphery and work your way in,” that would mean that, instead of constantly playing catch-up and always following on, as a community with the opportunity to benefit most from that sort of innovation, we could be at the cutting edge.
In recent years, one of the most important parts of our local economy, on both Orkney and Shetland, has been the growth of tourism. We have gone from the days when bed and breakfast was provided by a few farmers’ wives to supplement their farming income to a position now where tourism is a significant part of our local economy. Obviously, it is part of an economy that is enormously vulnerable to outside influences, for example currency fluctuations. Also, terrorism and the attractiveness of our country as a whole will have a very long tail by the time that they reach Orkney and Shetland.
Tourism is also an industry that has big seasonal variations. People work long hours during the summer months but will perhaps just keep their businesses ticking over in the winter. Now, if somebody is in receipt of tax credits, for example, such big fluctuations of income throughout the financial year can be occasionally enormously problematic. Again, that is another example of the way in which the decisions made at the centre, which might work very well for 95% of people, can cause real difficulties in the way that they affect the remainder. When we hear about something benefiting the 95%, those of us who are islanders know that we will inevitably be largely among the remaining 5%.
The biggest opportunity for islands to contribute to our future wealth and prosperity in this country comes from the development of renewable energy. The first generation of wind turbines was tested in a prototype on Burgar Hill in Evie, in Orkney. Ever since then, those of us within the isles have been enthusiastic in our promotion of the next generation of electricity and energy development.
The development of wave and tidal power brings another opportunity. It is still very much in its infancy, but again it would require just a little bit of tweaking to make the regulation and the development funding work. Development money for wave and tidal power sits in a pot for developing technologies, alongside offshore wind. It is pretty well accepted that offshore wind is no longer a developing technology but is now a fairly mature
technology. However, as a consequence of that development and the way in which the price of offshore wind has fallen, the full funding for developing technologies is then scooped up by offshore wind and the money that should be there to help wave and tidal power to develop is simply taken by offshore wind.
I do not begrudge offshore wind a penny of that money, but some dedicated pot of development funding for wave and tidal power would be of transformative benefit to the industry, and it would certainly be of enormous economic benefit to the island communities that I represent. Predominantly, though, it would allow us to contribute to the rest of the country.
We are not looking for any special favours or special treatment. We are not even looking for extra money from the coastal communities fund, although people should remember that that money came from the Crown Estate’s marine estate, and so we have contributed plenty to that fund over the years, through our fish farms, marinas and piers. We just want the opportunity to be allowed to contribute to the rest of the country to the fullest extent that we possibly can, and in that way we can all understand that through good times and bad we will share the risks and the opportunities.
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