Pete Bevington

4 April, 2008

WEST Burrafirth businessman John White has won the contract to run an international freight service between Norway, Scotland and Belgium.

Mr White will operate two ships, a large one operating once a week between Kristiansund, Zeebrugge and Rosyth, with a smaller vessel running a weekly service between Kristiansund and Lerwick.

The operation should start in November, but it still depends on European funding under the Marco Polo programme designed to take freight off the roads and onto the sea, to reduce costs and environmental impact.

Mr White has a background in ship building and salmon farming. He is a director of haulage firm Northwards Ltd and runs his own bus company on the isles.

He was picked by a group of interests under the name NORSHUKON (Norway – Shetland – UK – onwards) representing businesses and local authorities around the busy oil and fishing port of Kristiansund, and transport partnerships in Shetland and south east Scotland.

NORSHUKON had originally been looking at a passenger and freight service, but Mr White said the costs involved for anything more than freight were prohibitive.

The European Commission will have to subsidise the service for the first two years before it stands a chance of being viable, he said.

The main operation will involve a ship capable of transporting up to 150 trailers, exporting predominantly fish from Norway directly to Zeebrugge once a week. It will stop at Rosyth on the return leg picking up general cargo for Norway.

The Shetland service will be more fragile, but the plan is to develop a freight route between Norway, Aberdeen and Scrabster via Lerwick. With Scrabster developing as an oil port and Aker Kvaerner based around Kristiansund opportunities are envisaged for energy related traffic.

Mr White said yesterday (Thursday) he was pleased to have been picked, saying that it guaranteed Shetland’s continued involvement in the NORSHUKON project.

Shetland Development Trust invested £100,000 in a study to see how to include the islands on the route after Faroese Smyril Line dropped Lerwick from the sailing schedule in favour of Scrabster.

“This whole project is 100 per cent dependent on getting approval for financing from Europe,” Mr White said.

Many Norwegian haulage firms were looking for a sea route to Europe because of the growing shortage of drivers and the rising cost of fuel and pollution taxes.

Allan Wishart, chairman of Shetland transport partnership ZetTrans, said Mr White would have to work hard to develop a trade route between Norway and the north of Scotland.

“One of the difficulties is that freight operators have over a period of time established well used routes and depots, so there has to be work done to try and generate that sort of freight and move it on to these services,” Mr Wishart said.

“That’s something the operators will have to concentrate on, but having done their research they obviously feel confident enough to go for it.”