HIAL board sums up how quangos have been turned against people

A major tool in achieving this has been the shackling of quangos. Where once there were strong voices prepared to speak out for regions or economic sectors within Scotland, there are now faceless hacks who shuffle from one quango to the next, or preferably several at the same time.

The prime qualification for any quango role is that the quangoteer has challenged nothing in his or her previous one. Highlands and Islands Airports is a prime example – a fact that is at the heart of its current mismanagement and thirst for conflict with employees.

Until quite recently, HIAL was an organisation rooted in the Highlands and Islands with close links into the communities it serves. The airports were there long before HIAL and are, without exception, valued local assets, rich in history and character. They are respected, not least as providers of high quality local employment. Local people doing vital local jobs.

When Sandy Matheson made his debut as HIAL chairman before a Holyrood committee in 2001, he said: “HIAL can not only deliver safe, affordable, efficient and cost-effective services, but encourage social and economic development in the Highlands and Islands and consider means of countering remoteness, supporting fragile economies and reversing depopulation. I believe strongly in that, and make it one of my objectives as chair of HIAL ….. I believe that HIAL is a key player in the development, in the widest sense, of the Highlands and Islands”.

It is inconceivable that anyone associated with HIAL would speak in these terms today, or even know what he was talking about. The show is run by a product of the Stagecoach bus company, Inglis Lyon, who brought with him the management style in which that unpleasant enterprise prided itself. If ever there was an ambitious middle manager in need of a strong board to control him, it is Mr Lyon. Instead, it has a board of transients which knows and cares nothing for the noble aims defined by Mr Matheson.

The chair is Lorna Jack whose day job is as chief executive of the Law Society of Scotland, based in Edinburgh. There is no suggestion of any connection with the Highlands and Islands other than to chair one of the most important quangos affecting the region.

However, Ms Jack is a fully paid-up member of the quango circuit – any old quango will do. She also manages to fit in the Scottish Funding Council which doles out money to universities and colleges. Due to leave the Law Society later this year, further quangos are doubtless beckoning. Ms Jack will not be rocking any boats meantime.

The other non-executive directors are an odd collection with only one obvious thing in common – they have nothing to do with the Highlands and Islands, personally, culturally, economically. There is no claim of any connection to anywhere served by HIAL.

So who are they? Their biographies from HIAL’s web-site inform us that

- Eric Hollander was CEO of a Dutch bank, now enrolled in an executive management programme in Paris.

- Christopher Holliday is a non-executive director of an airline in the Channel Islands.

- Jim McLaughlin was Cumbria-based HR director for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and now lives in Linlithgow.

- Lorraine Young is a South African-trained chartered accountant, now a “finance and HR consultant”.

- Isabel Todenhofer worked with Lufthansa “before co-founding a real estate financing platform based in Madrid”.

Even by the standards of the SNP’s Quango Scotland, it is a bizarre assembly to end up running airports in the Highlands and Islands. Paris… Madrid … Channel Islands … Cumbria … South Africa. No CV suggests any connection to, or knowledge of, the Highlands and Islands.

The critical point is that to the Scottish Government, and particularly the civil servants who control quango appointments, that is not a handicap but an essential qualification. The last people they want anywhere near running these things are the natives – just as with CalMac and CMAL.

So to whom do the Air Traffic Controllers turn?

Ministers who won’t speak to them? A chair looking to her next quango job? A board of complete strangers who know nothing about the communities involved? A managing director with free rein to drive what is widely regarded as his own vanity project?

Welcome to the New Scottish Democracy. Maybe the old one wasn’t so bad.