Torcuil Crichton MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Jul 2025 · A75 and A77 Roads: Economic Impact · Hansard source

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  To the A75 and the A77, add the A9, which is the link from the Highlands to Scotland. For 25 years we have been waiting for it to be dualled; the SNP has failed to do that. The Scottish Government cannot make the ferries work and they cannot make the road work. Can the Secretary of State push them into action?

• 5 Feb 2025 · Closure of High Street Services: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  We are lucky that we have retained a mobile banking service in the highlands and islands, with the bank van a familiar sight in villages throughout the islands and parts of the highlands, but a central post office in any town in a rural constituency is vital for businesses to deposit their cash as well as for cruise ship tourists and islanders and town dwellers to exchange their currency. I am concerned that the downgrading of Stornoway’s directly managed branch to a franchise counter would leave many of my constituents disadvantaged. The Crown post office provides services such as currency exchange, banking services and passport services that many franchised post offices do not. To go to another Crown office or to find bureaus elsewhere would involve an hour-long bus journey, which would be preceded by a three-hour ferry journey, because the nearest branch would be on the mainland somewhere near the constituency of the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross. The limited services offered by a franchised post office would not be adequate for my town or any other, because, as I understand it, there is no requirement for them to accommodate the full spectrum of post office services that directly managed branches currently offer. Concerned MPs have met Post Office executives and highlighted their concerns to the Minister. I hope that the Post Office and the Government take into account rurality and the unique circumstances of island constituencies when considering the future of post offices and the rural high street.

• 7 Jan 2025 · Budget: Scotland · Hansard source

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  I am sorry, Ms Vaz. On ferries, we welcome the very late arrival of the Glen Sannox and soon the Glen Rosa. A minor earthquake welcomed the Glen Sannox through the Sound of Mull as she made her test run. We are glad they are there, but that is only one ferry crisis; there is also the inter-island ferry crisis. The two ferries that connect and hold our Western Isles chain together are limping on, but under the SNP’s replacement scheme they will not be replaced for another decade. Those ferries are meant to have four engines but are running on three. Our road between the isles has also been neglected and run down by the SNP. I know that time is short, so I will not detain the House much longer. I have mentioned the neglect of rural areas. We see that in rural housing, where we are facing a depopulation crisis and where, from a budget of £25 million for rural housing, only 17 homes have been built in rural Scotland. All this happens because the Scottish Government have a bigger budget. We have no transparency on where that budget is going or how the money is spent. The SNP Government have one year to turn that around. They had better shape up or ship out.

• 7 Jan 2025 · Budget: Scotland · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Gregor Poynton) for securing this important debate. I join him in welcoming this record settlement of more than £4 billion for the Scottish Government, but I would not want Members to go away with the impression that the SNP Government are somehow benignly mismanaging the economy, carelessly not controlling the NHS or accidentally running down educational standards in Scotland. They are involved in nothing less than the wilful destruction of the pillars of public life and public services in Scotland, because they are neglecting to make difficult decisions. They are putting off the reckoning that there must be in education; we must leave educationalists to educate and teachers to teach. They are also wilfully neglecting transport in the Western Isles and the west coast, and the health needs of constituents like mine. My hon. Friend the Member for Livingston said that one in six Scots are on waiting lists. My constituents in the Western Isles are not on waiting lists; they are waiting for the sound of a helicopter to take them to hospital, because the NHS does not properly function in the Western Isles thanks to the Scottish Government’s neglect and the lack of resources given to it. In the Western Isles, people do not take an ambulance or a taxi to hospital; they take a bus to an airport, to take a small flight to another airport, to take a flight to a mainland airport, to take a taxi to hospital to get chemotherapy. That is the state of the NHS in Scotland under the SNP.

• 7 Jan 2025 · Budget: Scotland · Hansard source

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  I understand the hon. Gentleman’s passionate defence of his own position, but the truth is that, despite higher spending per head in Scotland, that money is inefficiently used on a massive management structure—boards upon boards and quangos upon quangos—that does not put patients first, as evidenced in the Western Isles. There is no better evidence of these issues than the transport decisions made over my constituents. We have three companies—a Bermuda triangle—running ferry services: CalMac, Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd and Transport Scotland, with hardly an island representative.

• 26 Nov 2024 · Project Gigabit · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) for raising this important issue today. However, I wonder if he could come with me for a few seconds, away from Surrey, to Diracleit on the Isle of Harris, where I stood a few weeks ago. It is a small settlement, with only a few houses and a few social houses on the main road, but it is an internet desert. There are three tourism businesses in that settlement that know they are losing money, losing paying guests and losing their minds with frustration because of slow internet connections. Despite superfast broadband fibre running along the main spine of the Western Isles, and many success stories—people can work for software companies in California from Lewis, and for insurance companies and accountancy firms in Glasgow and London—to be a few hundred metres off the beaten track is to remain in an internet desert. In Harris, 10% of households are unable to get decent broadband, and the same is true across the rest of the Western Isles: 10% of households cannot get speeds over 10 megabits per second. Some of us are living life in the slow lane. Diracleit, small as it is, is not hard to reach; it is only one mile from the streetlights and sophistication of Tarbert in Harris—the ferry port and the centre of the Harris universe—and there are many other places in the Western Isles and rural Scotland just like Diracleit. Scotland has a scheme similar to the UK gigabit voucher scheme: the Scottish broadband voucher scheme. Theoretically, that scheme would provide £5,000 to premises with speeds of less than 30 megabits per second and, theoretically, it was meant to be completed in 2021. However, it is still in the procurement stage. In response to a recent freedom of information request, the Scottish Government revealed that they expect the roll-out of superfast broadband through the R100, or Reaching 100%, scheme to reach everywhere by 2028. I do not know how many megabits per second there are until 2028 but, even in Scotland, the SNP manages to build ferries faster than that. There are some successes. For example, the holy island of Iona has received superfast broadband. That is very good for Columba’s monks, who can now put down their quills and pick up their keyboards, but in the Western Isles, we feel we are waiting a long time. People and businesses in Diracleit and dozens of other single-track road settlements are staring at that never-connecting wheel of death. I know the Minister is under pressure to deliver for rural England, but I urge him to have words with Ministers in Scotland, who have let down the Western Isles and many other parts of rural Scotland. I hope he can press them to connect us—perhaps he could send them an email.

• 5 Nov 2024 · Future of Fishing · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I thank the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) for staging this important debate. As he would not take an intervention, I am forced on to my feet to make a speech, if only to ask him whether he is aware that two thirds of the UK’s fishing quota is owned by just 25 businesses, and that 80% of England’s fishing quota is in the hands of foreign owners or families who appear on the Sunday Times rich list each year. How we will resolve that foreign ownership of the fleet and the quota is a question that he must answer in his conclusion. I come here fresh from the annual general meeting of the Western Isles Fishermen’s Association in my constituency. While fishing quotas are devolved to another Parliament, I think the principles that I will address—on which I might find common ground with the hon. Member —are points worth making. The Western Isles Fishermen’s Association looks on Brexit, as many of us do, as having just one glimmer of hope, and that is the return of fishing quota to the UK Government. It has led to additional fishing quota being available, at least for the next two years, and the distribution of that quota is devolved among all different Governments. The Western Isles Fishermen’s Association argues, as I do, that that is a national resource and should be distributed in a system that is fair, and that takes into account, as the hon. Member says, the economic linkage between quotas, fragile coastal communities, and those that are adjacent to quotas. If the quota is distributed according to historical catching patterns, it will simply go to those on the Sunday Times rich list and the foreign shipping owners he so deplores. On the historical track record, the distribution of quota would not give any opportunity to our coastal communities. The system has to be rethought, it has to be linked, and additional quota has to be given to municipal or local authorities in order that they can share or lease that quota to locally based boats and build up—as the hon. Member wants too—from very small beginnings a new pelagic fleet, new processing and a new future.