Chamber and committees

Fiona Clubb submission of 14 June 2021

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

Communities’ ability to influence planning decisions in onshore windfarm developments. I wish to support the concepts of:

1) Professional help to engage in planning

2) Independent advocate

I have no less than 11 major planning developments impacting heavily on my postcode alone. There is no professional or legal help available to make sense of the planning documentation, with each application running to thousands of pages brimming with scientific jargon. I am dyslexic and have found the last 5 years of living under this dark planning cloud as hell on earth.

I have attempted to engage with “those in the know”, to get some help. Alas I have only found out one truth: our governing system is in crisis.

Those of us in rural areas crippled by the Windrush are experiencing a governing system totally out of control. No self-respecting turbine engineer would allow blades to keep rotating in a hurricane! Turbines are governed. In the same manner, the developers whose rhetoric spins out of control at the helm of their legal team, must surely be governed too.

Just as parliament requires majority parties to be held to account by the opposition, the legal representatives of planning beneficiaries must be held to account by legal and other professional representation for the negatively affected.

Yet in the current Windrush we are existing, and I mean literally just existing, under an inequitable regime where all legal and professional resources are directed towards the beneficiaries.

The renewable sector has been very astute in offering “Community Benefit”, yet it comes at a very high cost. It undermines our democratic process. It develops a governing system without the feedback loop, a necessary facet to render our social and ecological environments sustainable.

1) In real terms windfarm community benefits do not allow the negatively affected to receive funds to object to windfarms.

2) If a host community council objects and a windfarm is consented then the benefits are siphoned to other communities by way of psychological punishment.

3) Any governing body which loses its impartiality on account of effective blackmail is transitioned to the side of the beneficiaries and is therefore unable to perform its democratic function or express its value system honestly.

4) In a rational democratic society, the main things that set the necessary limits on a governance model are: a) Legal system; b) Professional knowledge system c) Value system

5) The necessary feedback loop in our democratic governing system relates to proper community engagement. This process requires equal representation within legal, professional and value fields of expertise.

The simple fact is that communities cannot use windfarm benefit to fund professional and legal representation to fight unscrupulous windfarms developers. Community benefits although welcome have destroyed the governing feedback loop. This can only be restored through professional and legal representation for the negatively affected.

Please support this petition and restore life to our rural communities in Scotland.