Successful Highland business boss calls for action against 'anti-business' rules
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
A Highland business has received further recognition for its success with a placing on a list of the 100 UK businesses with the fastest-growing profits.
Gael Force Group, which is based at Merkinch in Inverness, was one of only four Scottish firms to be placed on the Sunday Times BDO Profit Track 100, where it secured 36th place.
The league table ranks Britain's 100 private companies with the fastest-growing profits over their latest three years.
Stewart Graham, founder and managing director of Gael Force Group, said: “Our placing in the Sunday Times BDO Profit Track 100 is great recognition of the business we have been building over the past few years and acknowledgment of the tremendous underlying growth potential we have at Gael Force.
"Despite challenging pressures on demand caused from the effects of the Covid pandemic we remain enormously positive about the outlook, particularly over the medium and long term.
With our strategic mindset and a highly skilled determined team, I am very confident that we will continue to build on our strong progress over recent years.”
This is the second time in recent months that Gael Force, founded by Mr Graham as a teenager on the Isle of Lewis, has appeared on a Sunday Times list of top performing companies.
In February it was the top placed Scottish company on the Sunday Times HSBC International Track 200 league table, marketing the best performing exporters among the UK's mid-market private companies and follows its expansion into Canada to meet the needs of the country's aquaculture sector, with the establishment of a base in Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland and Labrador.
The latest accolade for the firm comes as Mr Graham issued a call for a concerted change of behaviour to prevent parts of rural Scotland becoming economically inactive.
In a passionately worded article, Mr Graham drew comparsion with the Highland Clearances in regard to the way that the people and needs of rural areas were being overlooked and forgotten.
Mr Graham wrote: “Like the Highland Clearances, the welfare of the local people who work the land and the sea is being considered as secondary to the narrow interests of a minority, often not rooted in the area, who care not for the economic wellbeing of other local people. We need to put people, their livelihoods and their wellbeing first.”
In particular, he hit out at a recent decision to refuse planning for an organic sea harvest fish farm at Balmaqueen near Skye, despite being recommended for approval.
This was set to create nine new direct jobs in Skye and support some 20 further jobs at Gael Force.
Instead, the firm has been forced to make a significant number of redundancies directly relating to the consequential cancellation of orders based on the decision to refuse planning.
Criticising the “narrowness in consideration and a failure of process and joined up thinking” behind the planning decision, he went on to add: “You simply cannot have development without some impact, but neither can you have social progression without economic development… we have become anti-development, anti-business in this country, yet we want all the benefits that depend on a strong, successful and growing economy.
“How can we call for building back our economy and protecting jobs, yet fail to support compliant job creating planning applications?”
Mr Graham is calling for all rural stakeholders, including government at local and national level, to not only support development, but ensure that they actively seek out and promote economic development opportunities within their areas of responsibility as a minimum.
“There needs to be some maturity in decision making and joined up thinking in policy and action,” he continued.
“If we do not see a change of behaviour in the support of development and growing the economy by all of us, we will be a failing nation, with rural areas becoming very largely inactive economically.”
