We’re following up with an opportunity to show support to Scottish field sports businesses excluded from government grants.
As we reported yesterday, the Scottish Government has exempted several fieldsports businesses from applying for coronavirus support, meaning those businesses could lose out on £10,000 worth of grants vital to their survival.
We spoke yesterday with BASC’s Ross Ewing, an expert on the field sports industry in Scotland and asked how the situation first came to his attention.
“One of our members got in touch with us, he’s got a small shooting business on a site which is classified as a ‘shootings’. He’s got two full-time employees and was looking at what support he can get and discovered that he was excluded. That’s when he got in touch with us.”
So the big question is ‘why’? Why are these businesses being excluded from support they desperately need?
“We really don’t know why they’ve been excluded,” continues Ross. “The conversations I have had with some MSPs indicate that it might simply be because these areas – these land holdings in particular – are quite complicated, but I’m really not sure and we haven’t seen anything from the Scottish Government as to why they might have done this.”
GTN has been trying to find out what lies behind this decision too, but with no response. In the absence of solid facts, it’s easy to imagine that maybe these exemptions have a political side to them too.
So we’d like your help to redress this injustice. If, like us, you think that Scottish field sports industries have as much right to government coronavirus support as any other industry in Scotland, please use the button below to send a message to Kate Forbes, the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Finance, asking that she overturn the exemptions immediately.
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