Fergus Ewing still fired up over ‘snubbing’ at Grantown summit
Tuesday’s wildfires summit at Grantown ignited a blaze of complaints from local MSP Fergus Ewing who - like so many others who had experienced the Carrbridge-Dava inferno - had not been invited.
He told the Strathy: “Whilst I welcome the recent interest of the Scottish Government, the Grant Arms Hotel meeting should have been held in July and it should have been open to the public and MSPs.
“Instead, I gather agriculture minister Jim Fairlie told the hand-picked audience that he needed to have the meeting in ‘a safe space’. Is it now dangerous for the public to be allowed to listen and question their elected government ministers? I know of land managers and owners who wanted to attend but were excluded.”
Nor had anyone mentioned that several residents in Dava were totally neglected, Mr Ewing complained, “with no advice offered to them at any stage, whether to evacuate their homes in the face of the fire approaching their homes.
“I raised this with the fire service who say they are looking into it. They were forgotten about. It is not even now clear whether it was the fire service or the council who have the duty to provide such advice in wildfire emergencies.
“Local keepers repeatedly warn that the growth of re-wilding in some estates means there is a hugely increased fire load from uncontrolled heather and that the risks of a catastrophic fire engulfing huge areas of the countryside and putting lives at risk is significant.
“These owners must be put under obligation to steward their land in a way which will enable prevention of spread of wild fires. There’s no sign the Government accept this.”
When Parliament resumes I shall seek to call for a ministerial statement on wildfires so that answers can be had to many very serious questions.
Speaking to Strathy politics correspondent Scott MacLennan after the Grantown summit, the agriculture minister - who convened it with Siobhan Brown, the minister for victims and community safety - said: “Everybody accepts that there is no one silver bullet, there is no one thing that will make the difference – we just live in a different era, in different times and the collaboration and working together is essential so that we can put the resilience and the protections in place that we all want to see.
“There were areas of discussion around insurance, who is insured for what and when so we are going to be taking that away – there is talk of having the equivalent of a mountain rescue team to have a sort of standing fire resilience team in the same kind of way.
“So we are taking that to a round table of MSPs for in the parliament and if they can add anything of value back into that conversation we will then take all of that together and we will hope to have some early starts [of work] so that we have better resilience in place before the start of the next wildfire season in March-April next year.”
He added: “One of the things that everyone I think took away is that the value of bringing everyone into a room together is one of the things we can do working across our portfolios with a direct instruction from the First Minister that we need to look at what our resilience is.
“The relationship that has been built up recently between the SFRS and the land managers has been fantastic and we want that to continue. There were areas of discussion around insurance and talk of having the equivalent of a mountain rescue team to have a sort of standing fire resilience team.
“So we are taking that to a round table of MSPs for in the parliament. I think it has been incredibly positive, I think there has been a lot of good stuff come out of it.”