Vision and priorities

Issue

There was overall support for the draft Vision and the 4 draft Priorities and a good range of comments and suggestions from both those who agreed and those who disagreed with the proposed wording. A common theme was that the aspiration set out in the Vision and Priorities was supported but there needed to be more reflection of people’s current experience of ferry services. There were also views expressed that each community will have different priorities and that the focus on reliability and resilience is driven by issues with certain CHFS services, with the concern that services that are operating well in these respects but face other challenges, in particular capacity and demand, risk being overlooked when it comes to Government action and funding.

Response

We will consider proposed changes and confirm the Vision in the final ICP Strategic Approach.

We agree that delivery of the Vision is essential. The ICP Strategic Approach and Vessels & Ports Plan are important steps in providing the long-term plan that has been asked for and will be followed up by more detailed local planning through community needs assessments. This is alongside the scaling up of the vessel replacement programme, with 13 vessels (almost a third of the CHFS/NIFS fleet) now under construction or in procurement, the preparation for the next CHFS3 contract, and the recent announcement of CalMac’s Enhancement & Change Plan.

The 4 Priorities reflect those of the National Transport Strategy but we will review alignment with other key policies, in particular the National Islands Plan and the National Strategy for Economic Transformation.

Given the high support, the Strategic Approach will confirm Reliability & Resilience as the First Priority of ICP. This will support the view that investment must be prioritised to firstly ensure that essential core transport services, including freight, are provided to all communities. The delivery of 6 new major vessels and the procurement of 7 new small vessels, along with associated port works, represent significant steps towards addressing the backlog in investment. The Vessels and Ports Plan notes the importance of maintaining momentum with this programme.

Funding and implementation of the investment programme set out in the Vessels and Ports Plan will, in future, will seek to deliver vessel replacements and port redevelopments before these reach the age when there is a high risk of reduced reliability due to asset life. Thus, services that are currently reliable and resilient should remain that way through asset management, including timely replacements and rebuilds. The current vessels in build and in procurement highlight this approach.

We agree that priorities will differ between routes and between communities – and also over time. A recurring theme noted in the consultation report is that the design of services should reflect local circumstances and priorities to support long-term economic development. Therefore, we endeavour to continue working with local communities to identify best ways to support those local priorities. This can include earlier and fuller consideration of the transport impacts of development planning; and developing ferry and other transport services to inform and support the delivery of local development plans. We are considering how to ensure that future community needs assessments have sufficient flexibility to enable this whilst using a consistent methodology and will be engaging with relevant local authorities and other key partners on this. This could be, for example, through the development of, and consultation on, localised transport planning objectives that would be linked to the network-wide priorities but enable those local objectives to inform and steer the identification and appraisal of options for change.

As stated in the draft Strategic Approach, the final version of the Vision “will guide long-term planning and decision-making and, with the Priorities, will provide high-level targets for us to monitor and review progress against.”