MINUTES

MARCH MEETING OF TIREE COMMUNITY COUNCIL

7 pm 11 March 2026

Online meeting using Zoom and streamed on the Tiree Community Council Facebook page

1. Present: Gerard McGoogan (chair), Dr John Holliday, John MacCaskill, Frances Khetrat and Tim Arkless. Cllr Kirsty MacFarlane (Coll CC); Cllr Andrew Kain (Argyll and Bute Council: ABC).
2. Welcome: the meeting was recorded. Recordings are deleted after the minutes are approved. Due to the upcoming elections, this meeting needs to be non-party-political.
3. Apologies: Cllr Willie Hume.
4. Declarations of interest: GMG and JH declared an interest in item 12 due to their directorships of Solar.
5. Minutes of last meeting: these were approved without change as a true record. Proposed JMC, seconded TA.
6. Matters arising: GMG still aims to ask about the numbers of successful Tiree applicants for the Business Resilience Fund. Figures should be available in a couple of weeks. ABC has allocated an additional £20k to fund community councils. It is not yet clear how this sum will be divided up. A number of customers have got £400 compensation (and some up to £600) from their ISPs for the internet outage following Storm Amy. GMG has not yet contacted the Trust about the bike stands and the community garden. He will do this.
7. Correspondence: the Community Led Local Development fund for 2026-2027 is now open for expressions of interest. The fund will be open from 20 February to 2 April.
8. Meeting reports: it has been a busy month. GMG and JH met Olivia Brown, Settlement Project Officer for ABC. She will write a report for council with recommendations for increasing the population of the island. GMG, JH, Phyl Myers and Ann MacDonald met Laura MacDonald, Douglas Hendry and Jim Lynch regarding the upcoming Local Governance Review, examining how a devolution of power might work. JH and GMG met Jenni Minto, MSP; there were no major issues. GMG had met with the Western Isles Climate Hub. GMG had met with the Cross-Party Group on Islands and the Scottish Islands Federation. Since the elections are so close, there are fewer new developments to report on.
9. Transport updates: JMC has been chasing the CalMac Area Manager to find out what is happening on the Tiree run after 14 April. Making advance bookings is therefore very difficult. Stephen is coming to the next TCC (virtually) and Tiree Transport Forum (in person) meetings. He will also provide a briefing on the company’s new policy on the carriage of electric vehicles on the ferry. There is still no information on this summer’s planned in-port maintenance programme in Oban. The new MV Isle of Islay is starting berthing trials, including Tiree. This vessel has a deeper draught. Transport Scotland is holding an engagement meeting on Tiree this coming Monday. We hope for a good attendance. KMF pointed out that Tiree and Coll have a shared service, and the two islands need to continue to work together. The Tiree pier office/marshalling yard project is still out to tender, with no news of when it might start. This month has seen bad weather with many cancellations. KMF also pointed out the number of CalMac weather alerts. These can cause cancelled bookings in the hotels. The minutes of the meeting in January regarding the Oban air service are now out, and we will publish them. JMC stated that our engagement with Loganair has deteriorated. We are still waiting for agreement of banked flights for 2026, and the first event is in early May. The winter second Saturday flight was dropped from the schedule without notifying us. JMC will contact Loganair and Transport Scotland about this. We need confirmation that the scheme to put passengers up when flights are cancelled has been reinstated. There are conflicting signals about this. JH will write to Loganair. The Loganair CEO is visiting Tiree in April. KMF is going to write to Fiona Hyslop to ask for a meeting about the deck space pilot and to explore a possible ‘Samso’ system to give islanders preference in certain circumstances. JMC will also write to support this meeting. The Highlands and Islands Travel Scheme, designed to reimburse patients’ travel costs still has serious problems. JH met one patient recently. JH will look into this matter and approach the Health Board again.
10. Argyll and Bute Council budget, including Tiree Library: AK reported that this year’s ABC budget had protected services as much as possible. Next year’s budget will be tougher, unless the financial situation improves. LiveArgyll has been given an additional £150k by ABC. It has been reported in the press that Islay and Tiree Libraries have been saved, but possibly just for one year. Moving the Tiree library into the school depends on building work. ABC has also given the Tiree food bank (Solar) £6k.                 
11. Broadband and R100: Openreach and Tiree Broadband hope to set up a drop-in session in An Talla in the near future for those who are not yet connected.
12. Telephone boxes: three more islanders have expressed an interest in doing up phone boxes. TA has identified a company that buys old phone boxes. GMG will contact SSEN Transmission to enquire about their disconnection.              
13. Planning: there were no planning applications to consider this month.
14. Argyll and Bute Councillors’ reports: AK had already made all the points he wanted to make.
15. AOCB: there was concern about the cost of heating oil on Tiree. There have been recent price rises due to the war in the Middle East, creating national concern. We have made enquiries, and the cost of heating oil on Tiree has roughly doubled in the last fortnight. The Scottish Islands Federation surveyed island CCs today about this matter. The Tiree Trust has also been in contact with us. Fuel poverty is already a big issue on the island.
16. Date and format of next meeting: the next meeting will be virtual and on Wednesday 15 April, deferred a week because of the school holidays.

Dr John Holliday 13 March 2026

Please note the Deck Space Pilot Scheme on the Oban/Coll/Tiree ferry service has now been expanded out from the original 7 days in advance of a vehicle booking request to 14 days in advance. 

Please find attached the minutes from January’s Airport Consultative meeting.

Airport Consultative Minutes 21st Jan 2026

Community needs assessment Tiree drop-in engagement session

AN TALLA – TIREE COMMUNITY HALL Monday 16th March 2026 15:00-19:00

Please find attached a poster about this planned community engagement events.

Transport Scotland have been looking closely at what data tells us about how services operate, how people use them, as well as the challenges, and we’ve built an initial picture of the transport connectivity issues the community faces.

These drop-in sessions are your chance to:

•         Tell us whether we’ve understood the issues correctly
•         Share your first-hand experiences of using ferry and other transport services
•         Highlight anything we’ve missed
•         Discuss what better connectivity would mean for your community

As these are these are drop-in sessions members of the community can attend at any time, within the allotted slot, and stay for as long or as little a period of time as they wish.

Liz Jack  (Ferries Strategy Programme Manager, Transport Scotland)

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83388073334?pwd=RWhXo2MMfI3jhJyZgulaA7xbmUfkjl.1

Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances we will need to cancel tonight’s meeting as we do not have a quorum. We will try and reschedule for next week.

Apologies

A lot of folks have been having problems getting the correct compensation from their ISPs if any at all. You should normally have received around £410.

Some may be due less if the ISP gave mobile (4G) fallback. And some may be due more if the fault lingered on.

The idea of this post is you can point your ISP to back-up your claim.

For those who did not get the correct amount of compensation the first section gives the correct dates. For those who were refused compensation because it “was out with our control” the second section quotes the “ISPs” industry’s code of conduct that forbids ISPs doing this.

• For those who were offered compensation less than £400 (often around £200)

This is probably because the ISP is using the wrong dates. Often the 7th to 31st Of October. They should be using the 3rd of October to 18th November. Allowing for excluded days this works out as 41 days * £9.98 =  £409.18.

The correct Start date:

We have now managed to get Openreach to confirm that broadband went down when power was lost on the 3rd of October.

“When power was restored on 7th October, it was then discovered that the subsea cable was impacted which effected full fibre customers. “

It was at this point that Openreach issued an area fault to all ISPs. This is why some ISPs wrongly use the 7th of October, when they should be using the 3rd.

The correct Fix Date

Some ISPs are using the 31st of October as a fix date. This was the date that Openreach gave an update. The fix was not till the 18th of November (just before the Scotland/Denmark game). BT emergency team have now acknowledged this via Jenni Minto’s team:

“BT advise that the repair successfully concluded on 18 November 2025 and that internet service providers will have been made aware of that. On that basis I would expect that 18 November is the date that would be used to determine the level of compensation due.”

ISPs avoiding payment of automatic compensation

Some islanders have been told that no compensation is due because it was out with the ISP’s  control. However, section 40 of Ofcom’s industry-code-of-practice-for-automatic-compensation states that ISPs cannot avoid compensation by saying it was not their fault.

“40. Subject to the exceptions in paragraph 39 above, the Communications Provider does not
avoid payment of automatic compensation if the issue was caused by an event outside of
the customer’s or its own control This type of event would include (but would not be limited
to) extreme weather, strikes and third-party acts.”

The document can be found here: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/consultations/uncategorised/98684—automatic-compensation/associated-documents/industry-code-of-practice-for-automatic-compensation-2024-v1.pdf?v=392135

If ISPs claim the are not liable, direct them to the above document.

Meanwhile we are trying to get the ISPs to sort this out automatically as is their duty. Progress is slow.

Terminal

Please find below an update from CM assets on the new Pier building and marshalling area: (Note option 1 was chosen”)

“I have provided some further information for you below that you can communicate back to the Community.

I appreciate that it is not obvious from the presentation documentation that is on the project webpage, however Option 1 was selected to take forward to the detailed design stage and is what will be built.

Please see attached the most recent general arrangement plan that formed part of the tender documentation.

Due to the scale of the construction works, the tender process was extended until after the Christmas period, with the following updated timescales:

Key project milestones

·         Project tender issued: Q3 2025

·         Contract awarded: Feb/Mar 2026

·         Construction starts: Anticipated Spring 2026, subject to funding approval

·         Construction duration: Approximately 12 months

In your response to being worried about “subject to funding approval”, due to the size and anticipated budget estimates for construction, we will still need to apply to Transport Scotland to approve funding through our business case justification process, once the tender process has been completed and we know how much the construction contract will be.”

For more info go to:

Tiree Terminal Works’ detailed design completed as tender process begins

TIREE COMMUNITY COUNCIL

JANUARY PUBLIC MEETING 7pm Wednesday 14 January 2026

Meeting will be inperson (at Trust offices), on Zoom and streamed to our Facebook account where it will remain for 30 days. We will delete our copy of the video once the minutes have been signed off.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89225224846?pwd=DRamSWl2yRIHGCbvCcHslhGS9KrrhE.1

Meeting ID: 892 2522 4846

Passcode: jrHrb1

1. Welcome
2. Apologies
3. Declarations of interest
4. Minutes of last meeting
5. Matters arising (not covered later):
6. Correspondence: bus stop at Pier View; police special constable
7. Meeting reports
8. Transport updates
9. Tiree Library
10. Broadband
11. Infrastructure: the Baptist church and hotels
12. Planning
13. Councillors’ reports
14. AOCB
15. Date and format of next meeting