Shetland backs £300m tunnels to replace ageing island ferries

Shetland Islands council has voted to pursue a £300m programme of undersea tunnels to link its northern isles to the mainland, replacing a ferry fleet whose oldest vessel entered service in 1982 and whose annual running costs have passed £26m.

Councillors agreed unanimously on Wednesday to seek Scottish and UK government backing for three tunnels: a 3.5-mile link from Toft to Yell, a shorter crossing between Yell and Unst, and a tunnel from Lerwick to Bressay, the island a few hundred metres across the harbour that is served by a ferry every half hour. A consultation that closed in September found 81% of 4,200 respondents in favour.

The council has spent four years studying the Faroe Islands, which have built 20 tunnels since the 1960s and whose newest, under the Eysturoy fjord, includes a roundabout 72 metres below the sea. A delegation from Tórshavn addressed Shetland councillors in the spring, and the council’s engineering consultants say the rock under Yell Sound is “comparable and in places better” than that in the Faroes.

Under the plan the tunnels would be tolled, at an estimated £6 a car journey, and financed over 40 years. The council says this would still be cheaper than the ferries, which require 220 crew and will need £180m of replacement vessels over the next 15 years whatever happens. “We spend more per head keeping our ferries afloat than any council in Scotland and we still cannot get a child from Unst to Lerwick for an evening class and home again,” said Magnus Leask, chair of the council’s infrastructure committee.

The council has set aside £4.5m for ground investigations and a full business case, with boreholes in Yell Sound due to begin in the spring. If funding is secured by 2029, the Yell tunnel could open in 2036.

The 1,200 residents of Yell and Unst, where the loss of the RAF base at Saxa Vord in 2006 and its planned rocket launches have made the economy swing between hope and decline, were strongly in favour. Marjorie Anderson, who runs a knitwear business in Baltasound on Unst and has to book her lorry on two ferries to reach the mainland, said: “I was 10 when they first talked about a tunnel. I am 58. If they actually dig it, I will drive through it with the windows down.”

Opposition came mainly from ferry workers’ unions, which want a guarantee of redeployment, and from a minority of islanders who fear fixed links would bring more traffic and weekend visitors. The council has promised that no ferry post will be lost before 2035.

The Scottish government, which already provides about £8m a year towards Shetland’s ferries, said it would “consider the business case when it is submitted”. Shetland has argued that it was promised the same treatment as the Western Isles, whose new vessels were funded centrally, and that a tunnel is simply a ferry that never breaks down.