Jamie Stone

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting a very remote part of Wester Ross—a new part of my constituency—with the intrepid Olivia and Susie from my office. We went first to Badluarach on the south side of Little Loch Broom. There, I spoke with a crofter, Lisa Stewart, across the wall of her croft. She was initially rather startled when I appeared, partly because I was dressed like this, and I think she mistook me for a Mormon missionary. We spoke of many things, one of which was that we had in the past an outreach clinic at Dundonnell where nurses and doctors would attend, and local people— elderly people in particular—could go with their ailments without having to make the long return trip to Ullapool. After covid, that once-a-week service was reduced to once a month, and Madam Deputy Speaker, you can imagine what concern that causes my constituents in this remote area, particularly the elderly and particularly during winter weather. Our intrepid trio then travelled in a little open ferry to Scoraig, on the other side of Little Loch Broom. The weather was choppy, the wind was getting up and I, in my suit, got rather soaked by the spray. In Scoraig, the locals told us about their deep concern at the state of their little jetty and of the similar one at Badluarach, which we had left earlier. I might point out that although Scoraig is on the mainland—it is on a peninsula—it is entirely inaccessible by any road; one can only get there by ferry. If one of these little jetties goes down, people cannot get to see the doctor or the nurse, and secondary pupils who spend the week in Ullapool cannot return to their homes for the weekend. There is a point behind all this, Madam Deputy Speaker. We heard in the Budget that His Majesty’s Government are giving the Scottish Government £820 million, and people in the remote parts of my constituency want to know where that money goes, because we see precious little of it ever coming to where we need it. We need the money to be spent on doing up the little jetties, and it would not cost much to do them up. We need the money to keep the clinic in Dundonnell open. It is incredibly important to people, but we always seem to see the money spent further south. What I am arguing for is a degree of transparency in the way the Scottish Government go about their spending. I am not saying for one instant that we in Westminster, or the UK Government, should tell the Scottish Government how to spend their money, but if we could see where the money was going, colleagues of any party whatsoever in Holyrood could start to ask the difficult questions—the questions that should be asked. I am going to abuse my position in my last minute and simply make the following point, which I think would help the Budget. Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks is upgrading the grid all over Scotland, and I accept that that is a strategic necessity for this country. Where SSEN proposes to put in a battery or new pylons, it is offering financial incentives—money—to local communities that will be affected. The important thing is that the electricity generated in the Western Isles will come through a vast undersea cable to Little Loch Broom. It will make landfall at Dundonnell, and then possibly come to where we are today, but the communities either side of that loch—Badluarach on one side, and Scoraig on the other—will receive not a penny. I hope that SSEN is listening to us, because there is a moral argument that it should take into account those communities as well. That money would be of enormous assistance to the UK’s Budget and the Scottish Budget.