Restoration of Inverness flights may come sooner
Morning flights between Stornoway and Inverness could be restored sooner than the end of October, the chief executive of Highlands and Islands Airports Ltd, Paul Kelsall, told the Gazette this week.
The Scottish Government has given Highlands and Islands Airport Limited an additional £1 million to allow restoration of lifeline services between Inverness and Stornoway, as well as Kirkwall and Sumburgh.
While welcomed, the announcement has raised questions of why the services were lost in the first place, with multi-million pound costs for the NHS alone, when the same intervention could have prevented it.
According to Mr Kelsall, negotiations with Loganair – which had been going on since February without island communities being aware of the withdrawal threat – were still continuing when Loganair made their announcement.
When Mr Kelsall appeared before the Scottish Parliament’s Transport Committee’s urgent hearing, the chairman, Willie Rennie MSP, said he was “astonished” that the chief executive had not communicated with Ministers or senior civil servants about the implications of the negotiations failing.
However, Mr Kelsall told the Gazette: “We were still in negotiations and talking with them. I followed the route that I would normally follow, through my sponsor unit in Transport Scotland. There’s a process we have to follow.
“As I said in the committee, I spoke with my sponsor unit. That is the right way to do it. We weren’t expecting the negotiations to fail. We expected a solution”.
Mr Kelsall added that the Scottish Government intervention, intimated in a letter from Transport Secretary Stephen Flynn to Mr Rennie, offered “a genuinely deliverable solution – hopefully a lot sooner than the October date that was cited. We will work closely with Loganiar to get the routes going again”.
Welcoming the £1 million intervention, Donald Mackinnon MSP – who as a member of Holyrood’s Transport Committee encouraged its urgent attention to the issue – said the situation “should never have been allowed to escalate to this point in the first place”.
He emphasised the need for a long-term approach to island air travel, stating: “We desperately need the Scottish Government to take responsibility and deliver a strategy that ensures air services work for islanders while making the best use of public money”.
The £1 million is, at present, a “one-off” rather than an ongoing commitment so that the future of the Inverness services will remain in doubt without a longer term solution.
Industry sources suggest that Loganair’s change of approach is linked not only to the £1 million on offer but also their decision to end the Dundee-Heathrow route, announced this week.
It is understood that the aircraft released from it will be redeployed to an oil charter from Aberdeen while that plane will revert to its previous schedule on the island routes, from which it was withdrawn in July.
Loganair have also announced closure of their Southampton base, just nine months after it opened, due to heavy losses. Evidence suggests that extortionate fares imposed on their Highlands and Islands routes have been used to cross-subsidise loss-making services elsewhere in their network, though the company denies this.