McArthur urges government action on island resilience
Liam McArthur, Orkney’s MSP has today asked the Scottish Government what specific steps it will take to strengthen digital infrastructure in island communities, following a subsea cable fault that saw broadband services to several of Orkney’s north isles badly disrupted for over a month this spring.
Mr McArthur highlighted that there have been multiple cable faults affecting Orkney and Shetland in less than a year, with Orkney hit by another outage last summer which lasted almost two weeks, while Shetland experienced a similar loss of connectivity in October.
Mr McArthur also requested that Gillian Martin, Cabinet Secretary for Climate Action and Rural Affairs, meet with him to discuss the options for building much needed resilience.
In response, the Cabinet Secretary recognised the representations Mr McArthur has made to date on this matter and agreed to meet.
Commenting after the exchange, Mr McArthur said:
“I spent the early weeks of the election campaign travelling around Orkney’s ferry-linked isles, and I know from the conversations I had with local residents in the north isles that the most recent outage hit households, businesses and essential services incredibly hard.
“While I’ve been very clear with suppliers about their responsibility to support and compensate customers appropriately when incidents like this occur, the most recent fault was one of three that have affected the Northern Isles in less than a year.
“These repeated failures have exposed the vulnerability of island infrastructure, and the government must now accept that network resilience across Orkney and Shetland simply isn’t adequate.
“Islanders have a right to expect consistent and reliable services, and if we are to avoid similar sustained outages in future, further targeted government support to improve the resilience of digital infrastructure is clearly required. I welcome the Cabinet Secretary’s commitment to meet with me and look forward to engaging constructively on this matter.