Chamber and committees

Moscow and Waterside Community Council submission of 14 June 2021

PE1864/NNN - Increase the ability of communities to influence planning decisions for onshore windfarms

We write in support of this petition. Moscow and Waterside Community Council is a very small Community Council. For several years we have represented local residents facing many planning applications in relation to onshore windfarms, with one set of applications relating to one development occupying the Community Council’s agenda for many years.

Local residents in our area have a particular interest and concern due to local background. We are located very close to Whitelee Wind farm, the largest in Europe. When it was constructed, many residents local to the scheme were adversely affected, which gave us advance notice of some of the likely issues local residents would face.

We note the differences between the relevant Scottish and English legislation highlighted in the Petition.

Number of applications – simultaneous and consecutive applications

Our experience is of multiple applications –including simultaneously similar yet differing applications – relating to the same development, resulting in considerable effort by local interested residents and by the Community Council. Each application can extend to hundreds – or thousands – of supporting pages of documentation which must be reviewed each time. As a result local communities are overwhelmed and, over time and facing repeated applications, it is inevitable that the energy to respond diminishes, unfairly prejudicing the community and local residents.

Responses to applications have been met with subsequent changes by the applicant requiring further scrutiny. This has resulted in a seemingly endless onslaught of documentation to be addressed.

Engagement in the process

The inequality is further exacerbated by very well funded applicants which are able to engage teams of solicitors (indeed, over the course of many applications, hearings, and appeals, to engage several different firms of solicitors) to pursue the applications on their behalf, and to instruct multiple (and in our experience, sometimes contradictory) expert reports. The only real hope for the community is to instruct their own reports in response, at considerable expense. This presents its own significant difficulties for the community.

Local residents seeking to engage in the legal process or appeal face significant financial risk. Our experience – of many hearings, repeated appeals, engagement of QCs, robust questioning of those local residents who engaged at that level, show that there is considerable inequality in engagement.

Our community has also experienced procedural difficulties – in particular around Covid – resulting in an inability to participate fully within proceedings or to be properly represented.

Importance to local residents

It is crucial to recognise that opposition from local residents is made for important reasons which are relevant in rural communities in ways which urban communities may not appreciate – such as harm to local private water supplies where mains water is not provided; volume of construction traffic on roads not suited to it (and where there is no alternative route); significant increase in noise ; harm to local wildlife and the rural landscape, etc. Some of these effects can renders homes, or parts of communities, uninhabitable and force local residents to leave. In our area there are several historic farm properties rendered derelict by onshore windfarm developments, with a resulting loss of local farming.

Overall

We agree that the process is one sided. In our experience it is weighted towards the applicant and very much against local residents and the local community. We therefore support this Petition.

Yours faithfully

Moscow and Waterside Community Council