Orkney Islands Council’s income from its piers suffered a serious blow during the last year, it has been reported.
The council was hit with a deficit of more than £1m because of the pandemic.
Despite the bleak news, the council’s head of marine services James Buck explained that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed.
In a report to the council’s harbours sub-committee, the news was set out that the authorities miscellaneous piers had seen a deficit of £1.05m against an income budget of £1.87m.
However, much of this predicted income would have come from cruise liners which dropped away completely during the pandemic.
Harbour dues from other shipping were also down as both the reduction in passengers and travelling, in general, took its toll.
‘The figures are fairly bleak’, but it could’ve been worse
During the meeting, Mr Buck said: “Although it looks extremely bad in the figures here, I would remind you that the budget did include all those cruises. If you remove all that, we just didn’t quite cover our costs but we weren’t far off.
“If you treat it as a profit to loss account, we were only slightly down in miscellaneous piers and harbours for the annual. I think it was about £80,000 at the end if you do it that way.
“Actually, given the nature of last year, I think that’s a really good position to be in compared to other businesses in Orkney at the time that will have lost considerably more.
“I would like to thank the team that worked for me for the hard work they have done looking at alternative revenue generation and managing to get – despite such a big loss from the cruise industry – pretty close to a break-even position when you look at cost and income.”
Sub-committee chairman Graham Sinclair said: “While the figures are fairly bleak in some senses, against the council’s set budget, perhaps this year, if they are looked at in terms of a business profit and loss, it’s held up remarkably well in the face of real challenges.
“I tend to agree that it’s a ‘well done’ for achieving the figures that we see here.”
In better news for the council, they saw an income surplus of £2.72m against an income budget of £764,000 at Scapa Oil Port.
According to the report, this was due to there being more ship-to-ship operations than expected, less activity in terms of movement in reserves & development due to Covid, and more than anticipated incoming from harbour dues.