Your letters to the Helensburgh Advertiser: July 27, 2017

To have your say on any issue of local interest just email your views to editorial@helensburghadvertiser.co.uk with 'Letter' in the subject line, along with your name and address. We'll publish the best contributions in next week's issue!

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Nigel Allan, in his letter on the threat to Geilston House and its garden (Helensburgh Advertiser July 20), points out the National Trust for Scotland claims that Geilston incurs a loss of £85,000.

It is difficult to see how such a loss could be generated by the employment of two full time members of staff, on horticultural wages, and two, part time, seasonal workers. There must be other significant costs that require to be spelt out.

Furthermore, with the encouragement of the Trust, Geilston has seen the considerable involvement of volunteers. If they are to be truly valued their time should be costed and counted on the income side (as happens in Heritage Lottery funded projects).

On the income side, while the Trust acknowledges that 11,277 visitors enjoyed the gardens at Geilston in 2016/17, it appears to be disappointed that of these only 800 were non-members.

But that is the nature of a members based organisation, particularly when a garden is serving a local population, in this case in the west of Scotland.

While the 800 non-members will have been charged £6.50 entrance, the greater bulk of visitors will have paid their annual subscription to the NTS of between £43 and £100, depending on the membership category. The NTS appears to want to have its cake and eat it.

If the subscribing members’ entry fee is treated in the same way as non-members (a not unreasonable assumption) the total income from visitors will have been £73,260.

To this should be added a proportion of the new members’ subscriptions generated at Geilston (the garden having a good record in this respect as Nigel Allan points out), the rental from the former gardener’s house, and the sale of produce from the vegetable garden which, in total, must exceed £85,000. So, where is the loss coming from?

The loss has come about because the NTS did not act on the Conservation Plan that it commissioned after acquiring the property. It has not maintained the fabric of the house (witness, for instance, the long, drawn out saga of new leadwork, grant funded by Historic Scotland, having to be replaced at the NTS’s own expense as it had not complied with conservation standards).

In turn, there will have been emergency repairs, the costs of storing the furniture, and the ongoing costs related to allowing the building to lie empty: and this from an organisation whose primary aim is to conserve the properties in its care.

The NTS has indicated that the organisation is seeking to be ‘open, honest and up front’ about the future of Geilston (Helensburgh Advertiser, July 13).

If so there needs to be much more transparency about how the income and expenditure figures have been arrived at, and which relate to the garden, the house and to the organisation itself.

Any suggestion that a much-loved garden might be closed due to the failure of the NTS to put its own house in order should be resisted by the whole community.

Michael Thornley, Glenarn, Rhu

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(In reply to Jim Moohan, of HospitalWatch)

Thank you for your recent letter regarding the GP out of hours service at the Vale of Leven Hospital.

Firstly, I want to confirm that the Health Board remains totally committed to providing a high quality Out of Hours service to all communities across Greater Glasgow and Clyde. This commitment clearly extends to the population currently served by the Vale of Leven GP out of hours service.

However, the out of hours service across Scotland is facing significant challenges in staffing existing centres and home visiting services. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde is no different in experiencing these issues. As a result, when not enough GPs were available to work in the out of hours centres, the service at the Vale of Leven Hospital and some of our other sites have had to close for short periods over recent months.

This situation is being addressed and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and the local Health and Social Care Partnerships are reviewing how the service might be made more sustainable for all our local communities. This review will take into account the recommendations of the national review of the GP out of hours service undertaken by Sir Lewis Ritchie.

At the same time, we are consulting with GPs and evaluating how we can best use the services of the existing cohort who currently volunteer to work out of hours. We have also increased the pay rates over the summer months to encourage more GPs to volunteer to work out of hours.

Hopefully, this letter will reassure you that the health board will continue to provide an out of hours service for West Dunbartonshire, and Argyll and Bute.

However, should you still wish to discuss this issue further, please contact us to arrange a mutually convenient time for you to meet with me and Jane Grant.

John Brown CBE, Chairman, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde

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On behalf of the directors of Helensburgh Tree Conservation Trust, I should like to thank the many members and friends who joined us at our Tree Planting Ceremony to celebrate Helensburgh’s street trees becoming a member of the National Tree Collections of Scotland.

You can support us by joining or donating to the Trust by: visiting our web site www.treetrust.co.uk or phoning the secretary on 01436 673310.

Elma Hannah, James Street, Helensburgh

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After it has been reported that the Scottish Government may escape EU fines over their on going late CAP payments fiasco thanks to UK wide CAP payments arriving on time, it seems that any progress the Scottish Government has been making has completely stalled.

Shockingly 1,300 farmers are still to receive CAP payments. Just 126 payments were made last week, which represents a significant drop from the previous rate of 1745 in the week before the deadline of 30th June.

Last week £1m of payments were made – compared to £59 million in the week before the deadline.

Under European rules 95 per cent of payments should have been made by 30 June, but the Scottish Government fell short, only reaching 90.4 per cent.

The Scottish Government was forced to request an extension from the European Commission for the second year running.

In contrast, Defra made 99.2 per cent of payments in England by the end of June deadline.

Media reports suggest that this UK-wide progress could spare Scotland heavier fines.

Audit Scotland recently warned that European fines of up to £60 million are possible if the troubled CAP IT system does not work.

How much longer will the separatists continue to starve our rural economy with their incompetence?

Like I have said many times before rural Scotland deserves better than the urban obsessed separatists.

Cllr Alastair Redman (Conservative, Kintyre and the Islands), Portnahaven, Islay

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Millions of people across the UK are unpaid carers - 6.8 million in fact.

When Carers UK’s recent State of Caring report highlighted the plight of unpaid carers, the findings, although astonishing, painted a sadly familiar picture.

In agreement with Carers UK, our own research found that many carers maintain their role for long periods of time with little or no time off. A third of carers said they had not had any significant time off since they started caring, with 90% not able to access proper holidays away from caring.

With such little access to time away it’s unsurprising that many carers begin to feel the pressure. In a separate study, 60% of carers we asked admitted that they felt unable to ‘switch off’ from their caring role, with over 6 out of 10 saying that they felt mentally exhausted and over half saying they didn’t know how they would be able to cope if things continued the way they were.

I work for Revitalise – a national charity that provides respite holidays for disabled people and carers. We see everyday how important respite is in enabling carers to continue coping and caring for their loved ones.

That’s why, we’re showing our support for unpaid carers all across the UK, calling for immediate action and greater statutory support for social care services.

If your readers would like more information about Revitalise, our breaks, or would like to support our vital work, please visit www.revitalise.org.uk or call us on 0303 303 0145.

Stephanie Stone, Revitalise

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I am spectacularly under-concerned at the level of the BBC’s remuneration of popular entertainers whose programmes are no doubt marketed by the Corporation at a profit.

What is hard to stomach is the proportion of my licence fee being spent on mere newsreaders when surely such “talent” can be sourced cheaply from regional programmes.

Even better, with Brexit in prospect, the BBC should look to recruit more broadcasters from our former colonies in the West Indies where wages may be low but the standards of literacy and spoken language seem infinitely superior to those currently obtaining in this benighted land.

John Eoin Douglas, via email