PSO is the only way to protect
Benbecula’s air service
It is plain to see that the rationale behind implementing a PSO on a ferry route also holds for a lifeline air route. Such a recognition has been awarded to Barra’s air connection with Glasgow and the inter-island services between Barra and Benbecula and Benbecula and Stornoway have also been recognised as lifeline routes in need of the protection of a PSO.
It should be recognised that what a PSO does, as well as provide the legal framework from which a subsidy can be provided to the operator, is to protect the route by ‘obliging’ the operator to provide a level of service in the public interest.
This is the crucial difference between a PSO and the current Air Discount Scheme (ADS). ADS is a scheme in which the commercial operator is ‘reimbursed’ for providing lower fares for a section of the route’s users. When the Scottish government decided to implement ADS in 2006 they had to apply to the EC in order to finance the scheme. Instead of imposing PSOs across the Highlands & Islands air network – which HITRANS (the Highlands and Islands Transport Partnership, a statutory body ‘tasked with pursuing improvements to the strategic transport services and infrastructure network’ across the region) advocated as long ago as February 2003 – the government chose to use a separate mechanism called ‘aid of a social character’ to offer discounts to a section of the community rather than all users of the network.
Ironically, the Transport Minister who launched the new scheme was Tavish Scott, Shetlands MSP and previous champion of PSOs, who, in the face of strenuous lobbying from Loganair and, it is thought, the Westminster government, inexplicably turned his back on the system he had so vigorously campaigned to introduce.
