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What price our heritage and local democracy?

BILL JAMIESON
The Scotsman (Original link, subscription only)
Fri 21 Jul 2006

OF SCOTLAND'S many claims to affection and respect round the world, none is greater than the enduring natural beauty of our Highlands and islands. Indeed, it is this beauty which draws visitors to Scotland in their millions and which makes this country such a special, and wonderful, place to live. Its greatest threat is the Scottish Executive and its abject surrender to the Green crazies and the wind farm industry. In the past ten days there have been two alarming developments that threaten both our national heritage and our local democracy.

The first was the defeat of a legal bid to overturn a decision by the Executive to grant planning permission for a giant wind farm close to the summit of the 1,100ft Hill of Towie at Drummuir, near Keith. The second was a decision this week by the Executive to approve plans for a £33 million wind farm near Stow in the Borders.

Both these developments were vigorously opposed by their local authorities - the bodies charged with implementing planning law and ensuring that its application reflects local wishes and sensibilities. At a stroke of the Executive pen, this has gone out of the window.

The Borders wind farm proposal, three miles north of Galashiels, will involve the installation of 19 turbines, each 110m high, by a developer called Wind Prospect. Plans were originally submitted in February 2004. Scottish Borders Council objected. The reason for the authority's ruling was that the development would have a detrimental effect on the local landscape.

Such a minor matter as local opinion was not to get in the way of the developer. It immediately lodged an appeal to the Executive, which has duly rolled over.

The Drummuir wind farm involves 21 turbines to be developed by a firm called Renewables Energy Systems of Hertfordshire. It is one of the largest wind companies in the world. Moray Council objected to the application, maintaining that it would be "an unacceptably intrusive, dominant and overbearing man-made feature in an open and exposed area of rural landscape".

Concerns about the impact on the local environment were not to stand in the way of this developer, either. It appealed to the Executive, which duly granted permission. Local councillors then sought a judicial review, arguing that the decision was a case of national policy being allowed to ride roughshod over the wishes of the people of Moray and the community of Drummuir. The council argued before the Court of Session in Edinburgh that there would be a cumulative impact when the development was taken along with approved wind farms at Paul's Hill and Cairn Uish in Moray and the Glens of Foudland in Aberdeenshire. It also claimed that the decisions taken by the Scottish Executive reporter, who chaired a public inquiry into the planning application, were perverse and unreasonable. The court backed the Executive and threw out the appeal.

A curiously Orwellian feature of the Borders case was the rationale given for the Executive's decision. This was the importance of the farm's contribution to the Executive's own renewable energy targets, allied to the lack of objection from Scottish Natural Heritage. This was considered "vital". SNH is an offshoot of the Scottish Executive. It derives its £62 million annual budget from the Executive. Its board is appointed by the Executive and its strategy and policies are determined in the light of its statutory obligations and guidance from the Executive.

IT IS remarkable that the Executive should thus be judge, jury and witness in its own case, and that SNH, a non-elected body largely comprising well-known faces from the public-sector carousel, should be able effectively to give the thumbs-up to wind farm applications regardless of local feeling and objections.

Close attention should also be paid to the words of Borders Council's planning manager, Alastair Lorimer. He believes the decision will become a "benchmark" by which other appeals against refusal should be judged. "I am sure developers will take encouragement from this decision," he said. I am sure they will. For the rulings not only make a mockery of local government and local democracy. They also threaten the entire planning system.

If local authority objections to wind farms can be so readily dispensed with, helped along by the very organisation charged with protecting our natural environment, there is not a part of Scotland that can consider itself safe from wind farm development. In this respect, the monstrous plans to cover Lewis with hundreds of turbines may be a taste of things to come on the mainland. Objections count for nothing. Our environment and our natural beauty count for nothing. Those rare and special qualities that brought visitors in their millions to Scotland count for nothing. All that counts is the Executive's renewables "targets" - uncosted, untested, unrealistic and cobbled together because the First Minister is in a political dither over nuclear energy.

Is it any wonder voters grow apathetic and cynical? Why bother to vote? And what respect can local authorities hope to maintain in the planning system? To sit in judgment over patio extensions or signage for a wee roadside cafe on the grounds of environmental impact while the Executive steamrollers through giant wind farms turns our planning system into a nonsense. What an appalling - and dangerous - precedent.

Nothing can now prevent the rape of Scotland's countryside by wind farms. But the rape of local government is almost as monstrous. Those who love our country - and our local democracy - have only one course left open: organise and fight.