A deep-sea port for Scotland would be pretty good for inward investment. When an international manufacturer is looking to locate a plant, it looks at transport—at its costs to market. A global exporter needs to consider how it gets its goods to market. A company that produces in Scotland, such as Diageo, Chivas and all those companies, needs to look at how it gets its product to market. At the moment, a company can put its product on a train from Coatbridge, possibly Mossend or wherever down to one of the southern ports and get it on to a deep-sea vessel from there, or it can take the product to Grangemouth, put it over to Rotterdam or Antwerp and put it on a vessel from there. That all has costs.
Some years ago, there was a scheme for a deep-sea port at Hunterston. I was quite interested in that; I thought that it was a good scheme and would have given Scotland an international port. That would have been a different scenario. As opposed to having to go to another country to get goods to market, we could be running down the Ayrshire coast—job done.
The Hunterston scheme has now gone. When vessels come over from the States, South America and Canada, they hit the UK coastline and go down it and through the English Channel to Rotterdam, where the cargo is unloaded and from where it finds its way on feeder vessels to Grangemouth or anywhere else in Europe. Similarly, traffic from the far east comes up through the English Channel, from where it is the same story.
The concept behind the Hunterston scheme was that vessels would come from the States and the far east, meet each other and swap cargo. A vessel from the States would drop off its European or far-east cargo here and sail back over. The scheme was fronted by Clydeport; it brought in a serious industry contender who had an interest in the scheme.
Another part of the scheme was that containers would be landed on the quay, as at Felixstowe or Southampton, from where containers that are landed come to Aberdeen. Anything for the UK could have been offloaded at Hunterston and run from there down to north-west England or the midlands. Why do something like 80 per cent of the goods that come into Southampton go north of Birmingham? The Hunterston scheme would have helped with that. I always suggest that the UK is like a football field with goalposts at one end. Why is everything going one way? Hunterston would have transformed rail.
We are all trying to funnel in. A shipping line could have chosen to have its UK hub, or at least one of its UK stops, at Hunterston. If one of its containers had been loaded in another part of the country, the container would have come to Hunterston rather than go to Felixstowe, Southampton or Tilbury.
The committee might think that that would be bad news for Freightliner, but it would not be—it would be good news for anyone. Trains would be running both ways. Instead of capacity funnelling one way in the network, there would be a much more balanced way of working. However, the Hunterston scheme is gone.
Another scheme is being looked at up in Scapa Flow. I believe that Professor Alf Baird is fronting it, and it is probably still on the drawing board.
In general, Scotland should consider the idea. We export a huge amount to the rest of the world, yet we do not have our own port. It seems odd that we are financing ports in Rotterdam, Antwerp and Zeebrugge to the detriment of UK ports. Ultimately, it would be better if we had a Scottish port.
That was me on my soapbox; I do not know how Andrew Malcolm and Kenneth Russell feel about this.