In 2007 I sat across a table from the American engineering giant that owned Nigg yard, in Easter Ross in the Scottish Highlands, and told them they had a responsibility to the Highlands to get it back into use. The yard had once employed 5,500 people. By then it was effectively closed, the infrastructure was deteriorating, and the skilled workforce was dispersing. I said it could not go on much longer before the site fell into disrepair. It was already at risk.
Last month, Mitsui committed £30 million to build a new heavy-duty quay there.
I have been thinking about that gap ever since the announcement landed. Not with any sense of personal credit. I was one voice at one meeting at the beginning of a very long road. But with a strong sense of what the intervening years actually required.
During my time on Highland Council I was always pushing officers to get projects as close to shovel-ready as possible. Not because I expected money to arrive immediately, but because I knew that when pockets of budget opened up, at government level or private sector level, the sites that were ready were the sites that won. Consents in place. Infrastructure understood. The unglamorous preparation work done before anyone was watching.
Nigg is what happens when that logic holds over two decades. More than £120 million invested in Highland energy infrastructure before this announcement. Planning consent and marine licence already secured before Mitsui made the call. A Sumitomo Electric cable factory already operating on the same site. The conditions did not follow the investment. The investment followed the conditions.
That is the part that rarely gets written about. The years when nothing looks like it is happening but everything is being made possible. The officers doing the groundwork. The local voices holding the line. The slow accumulation of infrastructure, relationships and readiness that eventually makes a Japanese industrial giant look at an Easter Ross port and decide the foundations are solid enough to build on.
Nigg is not a template. Every place has different assets and different constraints. But it is a reminder that the long game is real, and that the Highlands can play it.
It just requires people willing to be in the room before it looks like it matters.
Image: Nigg Fabrication Yard and Dock – sylvia duckworth / CC BY-SA 2.0
