Prospects for the county are good, says retiring Scrabster harbour manager
Scrabster Harbour Trust’s outgoing manager believes there are “a lot of reasons to be positive” about the future of the local economy.
Sandy Mackie, who retires today, helped bring about a transformation at the port with more than £38 million invested in improved infrastructure and facilities over the past 13 years.
Mr Mackie (60) first became trust manager at Scrabster in 2007. He left for a brief spell with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) in 2009 before returning in 2010.
“I think there’s a lot of reasons to be positive,” he said. “For me, the glass is more than half-full.
“We can’t ignore Dounreay and the fact now that Dounreay is not going to be disappearing towards the end of this decade. In fact, it’s probably going to be around for several decades, and that’s a major source of well-paid employment.
“But beyond that, outside the fence, there are other things going on in terms of the work that’s required to the electricity distribution network, substations, cabling… That’s positive. That’s going to require labour going forward.
“So I think the prospects for the county are good. The hard work is for local firms to be able to access those opportunities.
“We’ve got a very well-developed, highly qualified supply chain who are more than capable and are already grasping those opportunities.
“I think the issue is a tight labour market – it’s finding the folk to do the work.
“It kind of upsets me, some of the estimates about population and depopulation. Hopefully we can arrest that trend. I think it’s important that we have the economic opportunities here that require schools, require hospitals.
“I am very aware that there is this negative commentary around the county which I don’t buy into. Unless we’re prepared to talk up the county then what are we actually wishing for?
“I’m optimistic. In tourism, Venture North [the destination management organisation for Caithness and Sutherland] decided they weren’t going to wait for a tourist board or whatever. They would take their destiny into their own hands, and that has worked.
“Growing up, tourism and Dounreay never really were good bedfellows, but now we do have a good tourism industry in the county and it can grow.”
In an interview with the John O’Groat Journal marking his retirement, Mr Mackie says he is fortunate to have worked for two organisations – Thurso College, then Scrabster Harbour Trust – that benefited from local decision-making.
He also highlighted the hundreds of jobs supported by Scrabster harbour.
“We asked the question [in 2009]: how many jobs are dependent on Scrabster? And nobody knew the answer,” Mr Mackie said. “With a bit of money from the NDA we got an independent economist to come in and he came up with a figure of, I think, 330 full-time equivalents.
“After we completed the Jubilee Quay project we did the same exercise again, around about 2016, and even in that short space of time that number had gone from 330 up to over 400. I suspect if we repeated that exercise again there would be even more jobs.”
Mr Mackie is a long-standing member of Reay Golf Club and he plans to spend more time on the golf course in his retirement. He is also an elder of St Peter’s and St Andrew’s Church in Thurso.
Mr Mackie’s replacement at Scrabster Harbour Trust is Ryan Maclean, previously a senior operations manager with Tesco Business Solutions.
