Skye community stands strong as inquiry into Ben Aketil wind farm begins

Councillor Ruaridh Stewart says 'Skye is not for sale' ahead of an inquiry into a wind farm development on the island which is due to run this week

Transcript

00:00I'm Rui Shurtham, one of the councillors here on Sky and Razay.

00:03So I'm here in Portree representing my constituents at the planning inquiry for the Ben Akatiel

00:08wind farm.

00:09For too long people in Sky have felt like decisions that are made about their communities are

00:12being made far away by ministers in Edinburgh or people in Glen Urquhart Road in Inverness.

00:17And I'm here to make sure that this community has a voice and that the Scottish Government

00:21here loud and clear that our community is not for sale, we do not want this wind farm,

00:26we do not want the pylons.

00:28This needs to stop because our communities are suffering.

00:30So towards the end of last year I took the difficult decision to step back from the planning

00:34process with Highland Council.

00:36My main reason was for too long I felt that decisions that were being made weren't serving

00:41our communities well, they weren't helping my constituents and I couldn't in good faith

00:45participate in a process that I thought was harming the people I was elected to serve.

00:48It was more of this sort of holistic view, you know, everybody can see what's happening

00:52but we've always on planning got to focus on things time at a time, so it's individual

00:56case by case, whereas what I'm hearing from my community is that's not going to cut it

01:00anymore.

01:01The scale of these developments, the speed that they're coming in at, what we need

01:04to do is call for a moratorium, a pause on all this until not only our communities but

01:08our planning service and planning policy can catch up.

01:12Because what planning is about fundamentally is making the right decisions for places and

01:15for people and at the moment what I'm seeing is none of those two things are happening.

01:19And all over Skye from the north to the south we're seeing the same thing, it's this trend

01:22of industrialisation, be it the wind farms in the north or the workers camps in the south,

01:28Skye seems to be the epicentre of these renewable developments.

01:31Very unfortunate actually because we hear this promise of jobs time and again, when the Skye

01:35reinforcement programme was being initiated when that came through planning the first time,

01:41what we heard was these promise of thousands of jobs for the Highlands but what we're seeing

01:45now is applications for workers camps, so this will be thousands of transient workers coming

01:49into the Highlands to work.

01:51These camps are going to be fitted out with restaurants, with bars, so there'll be no local

01:55spend, local businesses, local residents are not going to see any benefit from these projects

02:00but we'll be left with all of the costs.

02:02At the start of the day it was standing room only in the hall so that was really good to see

02:05and that just goes to show the strength of feeling that people here in Skye have towards

02:09not just this but all of these developments, as I said.

02:12How much cognise since the Scottish Government will take I don't know, we've seen often

02:16decisions are overturned regularly so you know there is a worrying trend of that but I can

02:21only hope that the reporter and the minister has reached the right decision with the Ben

02:25Aquatiel wind farm.