News / No U turn on tunnel option
SHETLAND Islands Council is to spend £450,000 this year on a study to find out if it can afford to build four tunnels to its main islands over the next 20 years, its infrastructure committee decided on Tuesday.
Some councillors argued it was a waste of money because the SIC could never raise the £300 million needed to build Britain’s first sub-sea fixed links in the current economic climate.
However a majority voted to push on towards realising the most ambitious construction programme the oil rich authority has ever undertaken, saying that rising fuel prices will make it just as expensive to keep running the ferries.
Last June the council abandoned plans to build new ferries and terminals to serve the island of Whalsay in favour of examining the case for a fixed link to the island, along with ones to Bressay, Yell and Unst.
A steering group has met twice and proposed spending £450,000 on a study to see if it was realistic to believe the finance for tunnels could be raised from the Scottish government, European Union or private sources.
North Isles member Josie Simpson, an ex fishing skipper from Whalsay, pleaded with his colleagues to abandon the idea, saying that his native isle was haemorrhaging folk while the council chased an unaffordable dream.
“In the climate we are living in just now, I don’t think there is the funding out there. If we go down this road we’re pushing it into the long grass,” he said.
“We are losing people out of the island all of the time and I have to do everything I possibly can to stop that because the island needs every person that we can keep in.
“There is no week that goes by that there are not somebody leaving the island. We had two families that left last week.”
Councillor Simpson lost the vote to members who said the SIC had to stick to its guns after committing itself to investigating the tunnel option, and warned that ferries would prove to be just as expensive as tunnels in the long term.
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North Isles member Robert Henderson, a haulage operator living on Yell, said that his island could have had a tunnel for just £2.5 million more than it cost to replace the ferries a few years ago.
“Every penny a litre of fuel goes up it costs the ferry service £40,000. The cost of running ferries is going to keep on increasing as time goes on,” he warned.
Shetland Central member Betty Fullerton, who lives on the isle of Burra that has a bridge to the mainland, said the council should not change horses in midstream.
“I feel that for once we are taking a measured approach for something which is going to affect life on these islands for the foreseeable future, long after we are dead and buried,” she said.
However Lerwick North member Allan Wishart, vice chairman of transport partnership ZetTrans, reminded members that they could be forced to invest in the Whalasy ferry service anyway.
A survey into the condition of the three ferry terminals serving the island will report in the summer whether they can be maintained safely while the council examines the tunnel option.
Meanwhile £26 million set aside for replacing the Whalsay ferry is being transferred to a general fund to cover inter island transport throughout Shetland.
ZetTrans transport chief Michael Craigie pointed out that any case for tunnels would have to be very robust as it would come under intense scrutiny, both nationally and locally.
He added that it would have to retain widespread local support over a 20 year period and the existing ferries would have to be able to cope in the meantime.
While the cost of building four tunnels could reach £350 million, he said, the cost of replacing the islands’ ferries and terminals could be £100 million, while the annual running costs of the ferries stands at around £11 million.
In the first nine months of this financial year the cost of fuel has pushed the SIC ferries service over budget by £143,000.
The SIC has carried out a full appraisal to build a tunnel to Bressay and says that it can afford to go ahead using its own funds over the next five years.
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