March 15th, 2011<\/p>\n
MSP challenges coastguard cuts<\/strong><\/p>\n Greenock and Inverclyde MSP Duncan McNeil has challenged the Government to think again over dangerous cuts to the coastguard services.<\/p>\n The local MSP met with Sir Alan Massey, the chief executive officer of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency to Navy Buildings in Greenock this week.<\/p>\n Mr McNeil believes the UK Government is playing politics with the locations of the centres and the decision to remove MRCC Clyde could leave the area dangerously exposed.<\/p>\n He said: \u201cThe Clyde coastguard centre is responsible for the longest and most challenging stretch of coastline of any of the MRCCs, has the fifth highest levels of incidents in the UK and has the highest level of search and rescue hours in Scotland.<\/p>\n \u201cTo remove this centre is not only daft but dangerous and I am disappointed that Sir Alan Massey was not able to give any good reason why Aberdeen should be favoured over Greenock in the review.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was confirmed at an earlier meeting in Edinburgh with the chief coastguard Roger Johnston that had they been starting with a blank piece of paper, the likelihood would have been the retention of the centre here in Greenock.<\/p>\n \u201cI can only conclude that this is being driven by political consideration and not safety or cost efficiency.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" March 15th, 2011 MSP challenges coastguard cuts Greenock and Inverclyde MSP Duncan McNeil has challenged the Government to think again over dangerous cuts to the coastguard services. The local MSP met with Sir Alan Massey, the chief executive officer of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency to Navy Buildings in Greenock this week. Mr McNeil believes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-press-release"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":528,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions\/528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}