The Maritime and Coastguard Agency's (MCA) recent "direction" to the Cromarty Firth Port Authority to withdraw its application to transfer up to nine million tonnes of crude oil between tankers in open water, is welcome.
The port authority has to conduct further consultation and submit a new application if it wants to proceed with its plan for ship to ship transfers (STS) just outside the mouth of the firth. It certainly seems determined to do so.
However there is now time for further consideration of the issues raised. Not just the threat of an oil spill to the single most important European location for bottlenose dolphins and other designated sites, but issues of governance. One is the blatant dysfunctionality of the relevant present constitutional arrangements.
Having the UK Department for Transport (through the MCA) responsible for deciding whether the oil transfer plan poses an acceptable risk to the environment, when it is the Scottish Government which is charged with protecting that same marine environment, clearly doesn't work.
Meanwhile trust ports such as the Cromarty Firth are devolved. Yet the Scottish Government’s agency Transport Scotland has confirmed that it cannot interfere in the port authority’s business and neither can Scottish ministers. The only course for redress if, as in this case, ‘stakeholders’ believe the port is acting against local interests, is to go to court.
How can it be right that a body created by an act of parliament to manage a natural waterway, is above any democratic scrutiny? The more since 2003 board members appoint their successors without the previous requirement for ministerial approval - an arrangement due to be considered by the Court of Session.
As it happens MSPs will have an early opportunity to engage with these issues. A petition from the Cromarty Rising group, which is leading the campaign of opposition to the port authority’s application, has been lodged with Holyrood's petitions committee.
It calls on the ministers to ensure environmental legislation is sufficient to prevent ship-to-ship transfers of crude oil in environmentally sensitive locations, and to enhance the accountability of trust port boards to their stakeholders.
Surely even the most committed unionist MSPs should be able to support this.
But in the meantime members of the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee and the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee, might consider inviting the port authority, jointly or separately, to answer questions.
Such a move could establish an important precedent, particularly when there is Brexit-fuelled talk of more powers being Edinburgh-bound.
Local opponents to the oil transfers can hardly be accused of nimbyism. Communities round the Cromarty and Moray firths have had the oil industry in their backyards for the past 40 years, and have welcomed the employment it brought them. Neither is there any objection to oil transfers between tankers tied to the nearby Nigg jetty, which have been conducted safely for decades.
What the port authority is proposing is very different. That’s why 25 community councils now oppose it.
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