Isles politicians to attend meeting calling for pause on energy projects
The Highlands and Islands’ seven list MSPs are also invited
SHETLAND’S elected politicians have confirmed they will attend a public meeting likely to call for a pause on energy developments in the isles next month.
Planned to last two hours, the meeting, or convention, will be held at the Islesburgh Community Centre in Lerwick on Saturday 22 August, starting at 10.30am.
It is expected to call for an immediate stop to all energy projects “until a coherent plan and strategy are in place”.
Both MP Alistair Carmichael and MSP Hannah Mary Goodlad have confirmed that they will be in attendance.
Community councillors in Shetland backed the plans earlier this month, with politicians and councillors set to be asked to sign a declaration calling for a moratorium on any further developments.
All of the Highlands and Islands list MSPs have been invited to the meeting, alongside MSP Goodlad and MP Carmichael.
Highlands and Islands list MSP Tim Eagle (Scottish Conservatives) will attend the meeting in person, while Reform UK’s Max Bannerman will contribute remotely.
Eagle said it would be his third large convention on energy infrastructure already and added he wished “communities were actually being listened to”.
The idea was brought to the Association of Shetland Community Councils (ASCC) earlier this month by Andrew Archer.
The Tingwall, Whiteness and Weisdale Community Council chairman said energy projects were coming forward in a “chaotic manner”, with “no proper plan in place”.
“There’s no regard for what communities want,” Archer said.
Speaking on the latest episode of The Shetland Podcast, released earlier this week, Archer highlighted how similar conventions had been held across Scotland.
“This is something that started last summer in the Highland region,” he said.
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“Community councils there felt particularly powerless, they couldn’t stop them [developments] even where their local authority was rejecting them.
“There they said, what are we going to do? They got the community councillors together from across the region and got their MSPs to sign up to a thing called the unified statement, which calls for this planning inquiry commission moratorium.”
Archer said the idea was that these regions were “all calling for the same thing”.
“It’s the same unified statement, to get as many as possible of our MSPs to say, ‘hang on, when did Scotland consent to this?’
“Let us pause and work out is there a better way of doing it. The end result might be that some of this stuff has to happen, but at least let’s do it in a way that’s not this chaotic trampling of people.”
He added that the “big fear” was that there was much more to come in terms of energy infrastructure.
A number of large energy projects are on the horizon for Shetland, from onshore wind farms to substations and ammonia plants.
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