Buy-out for Ulva would be a mistake

Sir,

Many crofters and hill farmers in Argyll must be following the North West Mull Community Woodland Company’s bid for the 4,500-acre island of Ulva under the right-to-buy legislation, with scepticism and incredulity.

The question is not how the group will succeed in raising the £4.25 million and very likely more, but how they will be able to generate sufficient income to cover the annual running costs. They won’t.

Basic transport costs to Mull from the mainland are notoriously high, let alone to one of its offshore islands, to name only one problem. Legislation, Brexit and keeping unproductive livestock will present others. Many have tried and failed and at the end of the day if the community bid goes through, Ulva will be a burden on the council taxpayers of Argyll and Bute for the foreseeable future.

Like it or loath it, land in remote areas has always needed constant injections of private wealth to sustain it.

The application leaves much to chance and the unknown. For example, the group lays great store on creating additional employment by building more houses, yet the current owners have been actively marketing two properties on the island for let at rents below local authority housing benefit levels for the past year and a half without finding tenants.

The disheartening thing about community buy-outs is the inference that private ownership is bad and that land owners fail to look after their property or employ more people. Some are more conscientious than others but on the whole it is a system which, with one or two exceptions, has worked reasonably well in the Highlands and islands for the past 500 years without an alternative being found to please everyone.

The Howard family, who live on Ulva throughout the year and have shared in the daily joys and travails of the community there and on neighbouring Mull for three generations, have followed the fine adage that you never own an estate, it owns you, and with it comes a duty and a responsibility to those who depend on you.

In a week when Scotland’s struggling NHS is bracing itself to make £445 million of cuts to balance the books and care homes are closing every week, is this the right time for the Scottish Government to be handing out a very large sum of public money to five people?

There is only one hope for Ulva and those who currently live there, and that is to allow market forces to prevail. Iain Thornber, Knock House, Morvern.