Hi everyone,
Firstly I wanted to say hello and say well done to everyone who’s involved in this campaign work. And secondly I want to 100% warn you against having a national park in Galloway and to object to it in the strongest possible terms. I have no connection to Galloway whatsoever but I’m deeply concerned about the plans for a national park there based on the experiences we (as locals) have had in the Cairngorms for the past 20 years.
The exact same promises were made at the CNPA’s inauguration and almost all of those promises and the four key aims found in the National Parks (Scotland) Act 2000 have been broken, and worse, it has now caused HUGE problems across our communities and almost irreversible damage.
The most obvious problem is housing. Housing is at crisis point across Scotland but since 2015 in Aviemore and surrounding villages it has already been at crisis point. In some villages and neighbourhoods, up to 70% of housing is empty most of the year due to second home ownership or airbnbs. This has had the effect of both pushing up the average house price well above the national average, even factoring in for it being in a “rural” area, with house prices now similar to the central belt. Some areas have seen 400% increases in house prices in less than 15 years. The knock on effect also being that despite having over 5,000 homes around Aviemore, there are still over 2000 people on the Highland Council waiting list who are deemed homeless, having to stay with family, sleep on friends’ floors or couches or sleep in their vans. The average 2 bedroom basic flat is now around £800 per month and only about one rental property comes available once every 3-6 months in each village.
Young people who grow up here, even if they want to stay, cannot find housing. There are plenty of jobs but getting your own place is now impossible for most young people under 35 to ever achieve- whether rental or to buy.
The over-tourism is now beyond breaking point and has started to destroy the fabric of our local towns and communities, with almost gridlock traffic in the summer meaning locals now avoid the town centre and certain hot spots nearby because it is like going to Disneyland.
The Park Authority talks about “Sustainable” tourism but has not provided one progressive positive action or solution to combat these problems. It has essentially taken a “hands off” approach. Instead, visitor services and infrastructure has been slowly declining over the past 20 years and ZERO investment has been made by the park to improve these services. All this while visitor numbers have risen from 1 million to 3 million since the Park Authority came into being.
The community spirit and ethos of places like Aviemore have now been completely stripped away and a heartless town centre dominated by massive car parks and endless outdoor shops and chain stores has stripped the essence / fabric away from the town. It no longer has the same “warmth” it used to have and locals no longer go into town or go to local pubs for a drink as it has been taken over by tourists. The worst part being the Park Authority has failed to use its planning regulatory powers to stop companies buying up commercial properties and raising rents meaning local business can no longer find affordable business premises anymore and the ones that do struggle to make ends meet because their rates are three times what they would be for a similar town in a rural area. I could talk for hours on a number of points that the CNPA has failed our local communities and caused so many problems just from the existence of the park itself.
After 20 years and over £300m of funding, most locals cannot point to a single thing the park authority has done to improve their day to day living or improve the visitor experience. All the while problems with irresponsible car campers, forest fire risk, housing, over-tourism, camper-vans and communities / towns being stripped of their character has all slowly degraded the local area for the worse and it will now take at least 10 years of dedicated effort to reverse those changes. The community are starting to do that, realising the Park Authority has failed them but it’s a HUGE mountain to climb to undo the damage done, particularly around housing. Over 90% of local residents now believe the National Park Authority is not working and making things worse and many are calling for it to be removed or for the park authority to be brought under community control.
The CNPA has over 100 staff and an annual budget of around £15-20million but they can’t even address basic problems such as creating a wildfire management plan (been promised for 4 years and still no news on when it will be finalised) or a new park and ride scheme (promised for the past 3 years and no formal plans or consultation has occurred yet), this, despite the fact that the Sustainable Traffic Plan has been in the 5 year Park Plan since the park’s concept! They only recently took the decision to proceed with a Campfire bylaw after extreme pressure from the community, local press and several MSPs, which meant that Grant Moir had no choice – despite saying for the previous 4 years that a fire ban was “not needed” and everything was fine- when each year for the past 4 summers we had 2-3 near misses where a campfire almost got out of control and would have burnt down the whole forest around Aviemore and likely destroyed homes and businesses as a result. It was just SHEER luck this never happened but there were some close calls that could have gone the other way.
Ninety percent plus of visitors who come to the National Park come by car because public transport links in the park are so poor and have been declining year on year, making it unfeasible to get around without a car. Even travelling a short distance of 10 miles in the park can take up to 2 hours by public transport due to infrequent timetables and poor connection planning between services. And, most importantly, no strategic plan whatsoever to reverse the devastating impact the National Park has had on housing.
I’ve seen all the PR that NatureScot and Grant Moir have put out about the benefits of a National Park. And yes, in theory there can be benefits, but in reality, unless you have direct community control and progressive practical leadership (more project work, less admin) in the Park Authority itself (which we do not), it will undoubtedly become another bureaucratic nightmare and waste of public money which will make things MUCH MUCH worse in the long run. All the metrics that contribute to well being and quality of life in your local communities will decline – absolutely guaranteed- as they have done here, particularly in the last 10 years.
In the Cairngorms, we’re now fighting for the park authority to undergo a complete independent review and ask that it’s management is driven solely by a WHOLLY elected community board of directors. At present only 2 people from a board of 16 are locally elected for the part of the park that sees 80% of the visitors and deals with the majority of the negative impacts. In total, there are only 6 elected positions. In reality, the board is just an advisory role and the park is de facto run solely by one person, the CEO- whose failure of leadership and complete inability to recognise and admit the full scale of the problems created under his watch is one of the core reasons why these problems have escalated and continue to get worse year on year.
At the end of the day, like in any council or public authority, it just comes down to personalities / egos. If you are lucky and you have someone at the top who is progressive (has no ego) and wants to get on with the job and genuinely listens to the community and responds to what it wants- you might have a small chance that the national park could be beneficial for you. However, based on precedence both here in the Cairngorms and in most public bodies across Scotland, the likelihood is that it will just create a bureaucratic nightmare, which only self serves the park authority itself and does very little to improve the local communities. Whilst the influx of tourists being drawn to the National Park because it is “on the map” and promoted nationally and internationally will cause existing infrastructure to become overloaded and decline.
Again, if there’s investment in visitor infrastructure and services to meet the growing tourist numbers, it can work. But in 20 years of the CNPA’s existence, they have only, THIS PAST YEAR, been able to build ONE new toilet block (with 2 cubicles)! It took them 20 years to build one toilet, despite there being a desperate need for new toilet facilities across the park for the past 10 years. We now hold the record for the National Park with the lowest number of toilets per capita of visitors in any western country! Approx. 1 public toilet (cubicle) per each 90,000 visitors. This has meant people resort to peeing / pooping in bushes right next to car parks and beauty spots which has resorted in huge problems and fecal contamination in local rivers and lochs. This is just one of many examples of how the Park Authority has failed and continue to fails us. BUT, the scariest part of all of this is that they still talk about all the “successes” of the National Park and still spin all the usual PR despite the HUGE glaring problems we have front and centre on a daily basis. The complete cognitive dissonance from the Park Authority compared against the community (who know all about these problems) is just one word…..SCARY as is seeing NatureScot and Grant Moir spinning the same PR to Galloway as they have to our local communities.
They have made promise after promise but after 20 years, and locals giving them the benefit of the doubt time after time, none of those promises have been fulfilled and most locals now agree that nothing has changed (for the better) since the Park Authority came into existence. Instead, things have gotten much worse over the past 20 years on all the key issues local communities care about. Most now agree it would have been better if we never had a National Park in the first place.
