JMc

Scrabster or Gills gets my vote. One daytime and one nighttime six hour crossing per day from Shetland, got to be better than one overnighter. Would be an easy 13 hours Lerwick to Glasgow / Edinburgh including the drive, or 9 hours to Inverness. Even better if someone ran a fast train from Thurso. Might stop us moaning about Orkney having all the benefits of numerous short crossings a day.

Yip, living in a different world now. P&O didn't have to worry about Scottish Government watching their every move with a big stick in hand and the maritime rules were much slacker back then. Events like the Costa Concordia have driven up the procedures and rules they have to comply with. Plus, if Serco started to not apply the check in limits how long before 5 minutes turned to 10 and more. People would inevitably start to take the p#ss before long. Sorry for your mate, but maybe he should have called ahead - they might have been able to do more.

Shetland News - Mr Garrett can't explain why the previous operator added a further 25% discount for Shetlanders to a nationally established concession scheme. Someone at the time will have known and approved it. Or someone was asleep on the job. Or someone turned a blind eye. Or old Northlink was just financially incompetent. Who owned the operator at the time? Who was the transport minister? Who was the local MSP? Awkward.

Chooky, do you really think the government paid Serco millions to operate the service based on existing manning and wage levels and serco has pocketed the savings? If that is the assumption your being naive. The contract written by government must have excluded any defined level of crewing if Serco have been allowed to do this, especially as its been done so soon. So it's a fair bet that with that freedom and an obvious pressure to reduce the subsidy levels, whoever had won they'd probably be doing exactly the same. After all, what other big costs are there? Cost of the vessels is fixed, fuel is directly linked to the speed and number of services. Services have been trimmed probably for the same reason. Again, if taking out a few services was allowable in the specification it's reasonable to assume every bidder was going to go to two runs on the pentland firth. Why? All the figures are published - £23m in subsidy in 2007, £43m in subsidy by 2012. Scottish Government would be nuts to keep writing blank checks for the next 6 years. There's a recession and everyone in the country is taking pain. Your inflation busting rises whether negotiated, agreed or justifed will be a healthy contributor to the rising subsidy levels as the fares havent jumped that much over the years. Go figure why crew levels are under scrutiny. If your also taking the view your not a public employee, then why make a big deal about serco shareholders? if your not a public employee of course your going to be working for shareholders and all the more reason to not be surprised the employer is pushing through efficiencies. That's what any sensible private company would do. You can't have it both ways.

So let me get this right - we're about to suffer 9 days of strikes because Serco are going to honor a previous awarded 4+% pay rise this year and next, and are going to make no compulsory redundancies and have seemingly already received enough volunteers already which they are letting go on significantly better terms than the statutory minimum. Um.. remind me again of the issue?? Are the RMT seriously of the opinion that the current operation has no room for improvement and the business should employ people whether they have a full job to do or not? This is a £60m turnover business that looses the best part of £40m per year - a gap us tax payers are plugging, and should be plugging, because no commercial operation could possibly work as there is nowhere near enough business to make it viable. That's why its a lifeline. But as a taxpayer, i want my publicly funded services run as efficiently as they can be. There's plenty of opinion on this forum about SIC and it's 'non jobs' and how they should be striving for efficiency to save £33m. Northlink is no different.