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The pressure group, Southern Hebrides Against Marine Environmental Designations (SHAMED) has asked Scottish Cabinet Secretary Richard Lochhead for an enquiry into the circumstances behind what it claims has been a flawed consultation process over designation of East Mingulay as a Marine Special Area of Conservation.
Angus MacLeod, chairman of SHAMED, explained at a meeting on Barra at the end of January that the group was formed in response to the announcement by SNH that the Scottish Government intended to designate the Sound of Barra and the Mingulay Reef.
MacLeod claimed that SNH had withheld information from the group saying that their request for background correspondence was "manifestly unreasonable", given the number of documents involved and, presumably, the time and cost of fulfilling the request.
MacLeod explained: “David MacLennan's recollection of this is different according to the letter he wrote last November. He said, ‘It is clear that at every step of the way we have, to the best of our ability, cooperated with Cllr Manford and SHAMED...’"
“Let me say to Mr MacLennan, SNH and the Scottish Government : we still wish to see all the information going back to the year 2000 that relates to the Sound of Barra and Mingulay SACs.”
The group also claims that the proper process for consultation and designation has not been followed.
MacLeod said: “The proper procedure – and remember it is based on science - is that (1) SNH submits a scientific site selection document recommending the site to the Scottish Government. At that point (2) the site becomes a draft SAC. (3) Having considered the scientific evidence, the Minister moves the site to public consultation and it becomes a possible SAC.
“We have evidence to show that things were done very differently in the Mingulay Reef case. The Scottish Government took the decision to go to consultation on Mingulay certainly by May 2008 and possibly earlier. That is at least 15 months before SNH had sent the Government the scientific case for designating both sites.
“The Government decision to consult is supposed to be the last step not the first step in this part of the process and it should only be taken after the scientific case has been made for selecting the site. This means this Government gave an instruction to publicly consult using flawed procedures and it did not use science as the foundation of that decision.
“At every step of the way through the consultation, Ministers, politicians and SNH have been assuring us all that no decision had been made on putting the Mingulay Reef out to public consultation and the current position as regards the Sound of Barra is that no decision has been made. But we now know that the decision to consult was taken at least 2 ½ years ago.
“Roseanna Cunningham is worried that Scotland is going to be hit with very expensive infraction proceedings unless Mingulay is added to the Natura 2000 suite. Why then did she permit both the Sound of Barra and Mingulay sites to be specifically named at the EC Moderation Seminar in March 2009 when at that point SNH had not even officially recommended the two sites to her for designation? Or is it standard practice for chunks of the country to be bargained at EC level many months before the people who actually live and work on them are informed of what is going on?
“Who would want their future to lie in the hands of this process? And yet, if we do not stand up and fight these designations, this is what our future will look like. We should now consider what this amount of conservation at sea will do to our community's future.”
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