Largs & Millport Weekly News | News | "Who is going to monitor Hunterston?"

Friday, 25th July, 2008

Published: Wednesday, 26th March, 2008 10:20

"Who is going to monitor Hunterston?"

By Calum Corral

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Serious fears about the monitoring of Hunterston were aired at a public nuclear meeting after a warning that environment regulators for the power plant could be about to conduct industrial action.

Fairlie Community Council have aired safety concerns that Hunterston’s regulators - The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) - are considering going on strike and would therefore be limited in their important work they carry out in monitoring safety at the power plant. They carry out a range of research and checks on the both “A” and “B” station sites.

SEPA is responsible for the protection of the environment in Scotland and are one of the regulators for Hunterston Power Station but redundancies are taking place at the environmental agency and strike action. Site inspections at Hunterston may be affected as a consequence, it was revealed at the site-stakeholders meeting at Seamill Hydro.

Representatives of SEPA attended the meeting which includes representatives of community councils, and indicated that strike action is possible. The publicly-funded body, which has about 1,300 staff at 22 offices across Scotland, said about 43% of its total workforce were affected. About 570 workers have been given three months notice unless they accept new pay and conditions.

Mrs Rita Holmes of Fairlie Community Council was worried about the potential implications of the situation and said: “I would like to put on record my concerns about this. It doesn’t sound very good.”

Mr Kenny McDougall of Ardrossan Community Council said: “This is something which needs to be sorted out. We won’t have a safeguard there. Who is going to monitor the industry?”

Alan Fleming from Unison said: “The continuing refusal by the SEPA management to listen to the staff, and negotiate a fair set of pay and grading proposals, coupled with a range of other unilateral attacks on conditions is leading to poor morale in the workforce.

“Unison will not allow members to be bullied and brow-beaten in this way, and we will be considering all methods of challenging these Victorian labour relations - including by industrial action where appropriate.”

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