Week 36

Buses, Nairn Access Panel, Queenspark Residents Group, and the Green Freeport

A busy week

This has been the first full working week of the new year and it’s been a busy one. As well as Monday’s Queenpark Residents Group meeting which I discuss below I spent all day Tuesday in licensing related meetings and Wednesday at an extended ward business meeting which took up much of the day. Thursday brought a series of internal meetings about the Council’s capital programme and budget for 2023-24, of which more later, and on Friday I had training on sitting on the council’s employee Appeals Committee, which is one of my roles.

Buses

The school bus from Cawdor to Nairn Academy is now being operated by Highland Council and that then runs through the day as the Nairn Town Service, which was previously the 21. It’s now running as the 251, but to the same timetable .

After some gentle arm twisting the new year has also seen changes in the school services from Auldearn and Lochloy to the Academy with separate Stagecoach buses now serving these routes which should hopefully improve the service for everyone.

Nairn Access Panel

In my last post I talked about the work which is now underway to install drop kerbs in Tradespark but I didn’t make clear the role of the Nairn Access Panel in making this happen.

Nairn Access Panel lobby Highland Council to highlight accessibility problems in and around Nairn that are raised by members of the public as well as by members on the panel, and they suggest possible solutions that would increase accessibility for everyone in Nairn. Areas that they have been hard at work on include step-free access at Nairn railway station, better access at the beach, improved countryside paths, and most importantly, the general accessibility of the pavements and shops and social venues in town.

Séamus McArdle of the Panel wrote to me last week:

We are very pleased that our long standing work and ongoing discussions to encourage the council to drop kerbs in Tradespark to provide a safe route into the town centre has been successful. Nairn Access Panel will continue to push for the provision of dropped kerbs in all the housing schemes in Nairn to enable disabled people (and subsequently everyone) a safe, active routes around town.

Queenspark Residents Group

I attended a meeting of the group on Monday where a number of issues were raised including antisocial behaviour of various sorts and an infestation of rats.

The latter is now a real problem affecting many households. Council officers are actively involved and it looks like professional pest controllers are going to have to visit but residents need to do their bit too to help keep homes rat free, in particular not leaving piles of rubbish in gardens or leaving food scraps out for "birds" as this provides nesting and food for rats. Hopefully these actions, taken together, will help get this problem under control.

Meanwhile your ward councillors have arranged for the local chief police officer to attend our next meeting so that we can discuss issues around policing on the estate and we will continue to liaise with the Residents Group and council officers to try to resolve the issues they are reporting.

Cromarty Firth Freeport

We finally had the news this week that a “Green” freeport is to be established in the Highlands based around Cromarty Firth. The council leader, Raymond Bremner, was at the launch with the Prime Minister and afterwards published this statement. The Scottish Government also posted a news article about this and the other new freeport.

I first wrote about this project, then called Opportunity Cromarty Firth, back in July so if you want to know more about it that’s a good place to start and you’ll discover that the area around Nairn does form part of the wider freeport area, although we’re not going to be a freeport.

Hopefully this freeport will bring benefits to the whole of the Highlands but especially to the region around Cromarty Firth where it should attract the new jobs that the area is desperately short of.

For us here in Nairn & Cawdor I suspect the economic impact will be relatively small. The core of the freeport is a good hour’s drive away but there is an area in Inverness - the Port of Inverness, the former Longman Landfill, and Inverness Campus - which also form part of the freeport so some people working there may choose to live in Nairn, especially when and if the A96 is (finally!) duelled.

We will also need to keep a watchful eye on the potential environmental impacts and other issues arising from increased shipping movements in the inner Moray Firth.