Scottish Affairs Committee

“Our Borderlands, Our Future” Inquiry.

Memorandum from Rt. Hon. Sir Alan Beith

MP for Berwick upon Tweed

 

  1. I welcome the Committee’s inquiry into “Our Borderlands, Our Future”, which I hope will highlight the opportunities for productive co-operation between authorities on both sides of the border, and will address some of the obstacles to this co-operation.  People who live in the Berwick, Coldstream, Wooler and Kelso areas do not treat the border as a barrier in their daily lives.  Most families have members on the other side of the border, and local businesses and tradesmen do business across the border all the time.  However, we are finding that some public bodies increasingly treat the border as an international frontier which people should not cross when accessing public services.  This is nonsensical when, for example, the nearest main hospital to Berwick and the whole of the Tweed Valley is the Borders General, in Scotland; when most of the villages on the outskirts of Berwick are in Scotland but use Berwick for almost all their needs, including the GP services; and when almost all services in the Carham/Wark/Crookham area, including post, telephone and GP services, are provided from the Scottish side of the border.

 

  1. It is the NHS which seems to be creating the most barriers at present, with the Northumberland Clinical Commissioning Group seeking to prevent or discourage patients on the English side of the border from using the nearest clinically appropriate hospital if it is in Scotland.  In some recent cases ambulance staff have told patients that “protocol” prevents them taking patients to the Borders General.  This problem appears to have arisen because of a failure to conclude new contract agreements between the Northumberland Clinical Commissioning Group and NHS Borders, with outstanding issues apparently being primarily legal rather than price related.  However, existing contracts covering most areas of treatment should enable cross-border co-operation to operate more freely than is currently happening.  There are also occasional problems with Edinburgh hospitals telling Berwick patients that they must be treated in Newcastle, which is further away.  One of my constituents said that it was as if a “tartan curtain” had descended at the border.

 

  1. It has always been more problematic to access some education services across the border because the age transfer arrangements and examination systems are different.  This has not, however, prevented some cross-border access to schools, which is often important either for family reasons or because for other reasons an alternative secondary school placing is required, and the only nearby alternative is across the border.  There is sometimes greater difficulty in funding access to further education across the border because out-of-area payments are required.  This can have particularly unfair consequences for young people who have almost no F.E. facilities within 50 miles on the English side of the border, but can get more easily to Borders College facilities, for example at Duns.  The success of businesses on both sides of the border depends to a significant extent on the availability of educated and skilled potential employees in the whole of the area.

 

  1. There are parts of the public service in which close co-operation across the border and mutual aid are long-established and continuing – the police, for example, who are assisted by changes in the law which enable them to have the powers of a constable on both sides of the border.  There is co-operation in the Fire and Ambulance services, although in the latter case there have been recent examples of control-room failure to activate cross-border assistance when it was readily available.

 

  1. There is a significant element of cross-border co-operation over public transport, but the fact that pensioners’ bus passes are England-only or Scotland-only is much resented by people whose families are scattered across the border.  There are a few helpful negotiated exemptions for local journeys into Berwick and for bus travel from Berwick to the Borders General Hospital, but local pensioners do not see whey this facility should not be available for all their local travel.  Berwick station serves a large area of the Scottish Borders, and it is important that it is not excluded from offers such as special fares railcards which are intended to cover the whole of Scotland – practice on this has varied.

 

  1. The Eastern Borders is a recognisably district sub-regional economy embracing Berwickshire, North Northumberland and parts of Roxburghshire:  economic development in any part of it helps the whole area.  Factories and workshops in Berwick employ many residents of Scotland; the paper mill at Chirnside and businesses in Coldstream and Kelso employ many people from the English side of the border.  Tourism is by nature a cross-border activity; visitors want to see their rich heritage and wonderful scenery on both sides of the border.  Devolution means that different regimes and incentives can operate in different parts of this area:  that is unavoidable, but it should not prevent a collective and shared effort to promote the area as a whole, and that needs to be a higher priority for authorities in Northumberland and Scottish Borders, and governments in both Edinburgh and London.  In considering whether new structures or institutions might be needed to promote development in the Scottish Borders, the committee needs to bear in mind the need to work closely with the Local Economic Partnership, the County Council and the Tourist organisations covering Northumberland.

 

  1. Most people who live in the borders do not want the border to be divisive, and in daily life they do not treat it as a source of division.  That is one of the reasons for the heavy vote against independence in the Scottish Borders.  Many people find it puzzling and wrong that, after a decisive vote to stay together, public authorities seem to be putting up new barriers to working together.

 

19 January 2015