St Helena : Door Closed by Immigration Ruling
Submitted by Saint Helena Herald (Juanita Brock) 13.01.2006 (Article Archived on 27.01.2006)
The St. Helena Herald reports on Bill Scanes, who has worked in the Falkland Islands as well as on St. Helena.
Door Closed by Immigration Ruling
From the St. Helena Herald, Friday, 13 January 2006
Bill Scanes, until recently the Island’s Chief Engineer, has just had a double dose of bad news. Upon returning home last week from his family’s vacation in the Philippines, he found that the Immigration Committee had turned down his application to seek work as a freelance engineering consultant, and had also blocked his wife Fe’s bid to open a Chinese restaurant.
“We returned to discover that we’d both been turned down,” said Bill. “Most of all I feel disappointment. When we went away, I was convinced that Fe’s application in particular would go through. We were so confident that we even went and bought loads of Chinese decorations for the restaurant.”
Fe was planning to open a restaurant at Association Hall with her friend Daisy Terry. They have both had extensive experience of running restaurants. Bill continued, “It seems like such an obvious plus for the Island, to have a good Chinese restaurant. When tourists come here they often complain about a lack of variety in the Island’s restaurants. In fact, it is probably the number one complaint people have about St Helena. Now, here you are with two women, both of Asian extraction, both of whom have an extensive background in catering and in the preparation of eastern cuisine, who have offered to open a Chinese restaurant. And what is the result? Their application has been blocked! We were ready to go, as they say. It would have cost St Helena absolutely nothing. I believe that the Island, by choosing to forgo the chance of having a proper Chinese restaurant, is definitely missing out.
“It would have offered a proper table-service, serving food from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and China. There is nothing like that on the Island at the moment. People might say, ‘why can’t a Saint do it!’ The fact is though, delivering high quality Asian food is not an easy thing to do. You need experience and you need cooking skills. ”
Regarding his own application, Bill had originally hoped to work as a consultant engineer on a freelance basis. Having recently come to the end of his two-year stint as Chief Engineer, Bill had reckoned that his good local knowledge of St Helena’s infrastructure would provide a valuable link with contractors working on the proposed airport. “My thinking was that it would be much cheaper to hire my services on an ‘as needed’ basis, than for a company to send a consultant out from the UK. There would also be a financial advantage for St Helena, because my taxes would go to SHG, rather than to UK, which will be the case if a consultant has to be specially shipped out. I’ve been told though, ‘We can do it ourselves’. The point is, my work experience is ideally suited to the challenges that the airport will bring:
- I once built a whole beach resort in the Philippines! Furthermore, much of my work has involved the repair and maintenance of hotel accommodation, an area of expertise which might be of central importance if St Helena is to take advantage of the airport.
“The irony is that I’d only seen my freelance work as a kind of semi-retirement thing: - not in any way full time. I would have been liaising with local contractors, and I could have helped them to secure sub-contracting work connected with the airport, rather than the investor having to import their skilled workers from overseas. So it would have been good for the Island. The airport is coming: - it’s a totally new ball game. You have to embrace change. You can’t remain isolated in thoughts and deeds. If you do, then the potential of the airport will be lost. The problem is, some people don’t want to change. They want things to carry on the same old insular way. They don’t
Bill is disappointed on a personal level, as well from a business point of view. “My whole family is integrated here. My daughter is happy at school, and my wife has worked for two years at the hospital on a voluntary basis. I feel that we’ve put a lot of ourselves into the Island. When you embrace the Island in the way that we have, you imagine that you are accepted. As it is, if the appeal gets rejected, I’ll have no choice but to leave the Island and go and work in the UK. I’d love to have a nice life and prepare for retirement here, but at the moment I need to earn a bit of money. It does seem a bit unfair, because anybody from St Helena can just go to UK and get any job he likes, and freely buy a house, or land, or do whatever else he wants to do. Whereas here on St Helena, a country whose budget is overwhelmingly paid for by UK taxpayers, an Englishman finds his application for a work permit rejected. How on earth can it benefit St Helena, to block our freedom to work! We thought our plans would be embraced, but it looks as if the logic of protectionism has won the day. I’m very disappointed.”
After meeting Bill I contacted the Tourist Office with the aim of finding out what amenities would be most valued by visitors to the Island. Mrs Pamela Young, head of the Tourist Office, said that tourists are routinely given forms when they leave on the RMS, asking for their suggestions on how their stay on St Helena could have been improved. She said, “The two most common requests are for more access to local arts and crafts, and secondly, for more eating places with extended opening hours, and offering a wider variety of dishes than is at present the case.” Her comments would appear to confirm Bill’s opinion that a more diverse range of restaurants would be of major benefit to the Island.
Lastly, I contacted Mrs Gay Denbow, Chair of the Immigration Committee. She was reticent about commenting on Bill and Fe’s blocked application. “They have the right to appeal. Until they do so we really can’t discuss their case, as any comment I make might prejudice their appeal. We have to keep it confidential at this stage: - that’s the bottom line.”
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