My favourite Stornoway cafe has a sign in the entranceway that entreats visitors to be nice to the staff.
Like everyone, the sign explains, the cafe is struggling to find enough staff. Please don’t dump on the ones that are there.
Well, fair enough. And I must say that my coffee always arrives promptly in that harbourside establishment and is always just right. Joy.
The sign reveals a wider problem, however. No one can get enough staff on this island, and you can almost feel services creaking under the weight of that burden.
Another favourite cafe (yes, I do spend all my time in cafes) in South Harris stopped doing food last summer because they couldn’t get the staff. A bakery in Stornoway shut for the same reason. When I tried to book a hair appointment recently ahead of a visit to the mainland for a funeral, one Stornoway hairdresser told me they weren’t taking on any new clients at the moment.
“Is this a hairdresser or a management consultancy?” I wondered. I tried somewhere else, and they almost laughed down the phone at me for thinking it might be possible to get an appointment that week. This is for a cut and blow dry, you understand, not radical hair surgery.
In the end, I booked in with my old hairdresser in Glasgow. In much the same way, when we wanted to get the walls and ceilings in our house plastered, we brought a plasterer friend over from Glasgow to do it, because the idea that anyone on the island would be able to plaster our not-very-big house this century felt rather remote.
Businesses need staff and staff need homes
These might sound like petty grievances, and in terms of how they affect me, they are petty. I can’t get my hair cut when I want to. Boohoo. But these tiny personal setbacks reveal an economic black hole. I’m spending money in Glasgow that I wanted to spend in Stornoway, and I’m not alone.
Plenty has been said about our islands’ fragile economy. You might imagine that there are no jobs here, or that businesses just can’t thrive because, I don’t know, it’s too boggy or something. The truth is that businesses and the economy are being held back – strangled, in fact – by lack of workers.
I know of local businesses that could double or triple their turnover if only they could get the staff. There may be a variety of reasons why they can’t, but one stands out: housing.
A recently advertised post in Harris was filled and unfilled because the person who took it couldn’t find anywhere to stay. We need about 200 new houses in Harris, a local businessperson interested in the island’s development recently told me. There are plans to build perhaps a score, if we’re lucky.
Basic island infrastructure isn’t a priority for any government
It’s easy to blame the mythical retired couple from the south of England who move here and gobble up the housing stock while their progeny cavort around Surrey being stockbrokers. Certainly, a growing number of gin palaces now clutters Harris’s sparkling west coast, spoiling the view and doing nothing to resolve the housing crisis. In some villages, such as Northton in South Harris where the non-lunch-serving cafe is located, most of the lights are out in wintertime.
That’s not good, but it feels tiresome to blame the island housing crisis entirely on people from elsewhere. There’s a bit of cart and horse going on here, too. People with good jobs can compete with retirees in their local housing market, just as Glaswegians, say, compete with movers-in for the nicest tenement flats in their own city. But how many good jobs can there be if businesses can’t expand because they can’t get the staff because the staff can’t get houses?
It’s our old friend infrastructure again. And it’s painful to note that basic island infrastructure seems to be no more of a priority at Holyrood than it is at Westminster. Show me a bridge or a causeway in the Western Isles, and I’ll show you the circle of gold stars that denotes the European Union.
The Islands Growth Deal passed last year is not without ambition, but redeveloping the Callanish visitor centre will not fix the unglamorous problems of housing and inadequate public toilets. In fact, big, flashy projects might make these problems worse.
Please, powers that be, hear this plea: build some bloomin’ houses!
As the island prepares for the opening of the new Deep Water Terminal in Stornoway later this month and the influx of cruise ship visitors it will bring, there is real concern locally that island infrastructure won’t hold up.
The new terminal is a great facility. The Callanish Stones are amazing, and I expect the new visitor centre will be fabulous. But it is all for nought if workers don’t have homes.
So, please, powers that be, hear this plea: build some bloomin’ houses! Seriously. How hard can it be?
Fiona Rintoul is an author and translator
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