Meeting of the Parliament 26 January 2017
I extend a welcome to Bill Bowman and congratulate him on making an excellent first speech. He does so in this Parliament in our nation’s capital, which is a great microcosm of all that is good and all that is bad about planning in this country.
My constituency of Edinburgh Western is a thriving and diverse community and, like the rest of the city, it is growing year on year. Every year, Edinburgh gets 5,000 new people, and demand for housing is vastly outstripping supply. Edinburgh has a housing shortage—a housing crisis—but in my constituency, we have a development problem. Development is happening incrementally, and dormitory developments are being thrown up to feed into the city, particularly on the outskirts in communities such as Kirkliston and South Queensferry. Those are wonderful villages and towns, but already they are not, in and of themselves, sustained by adequate infrastructure in and of themselves. They lack affordable direct public transport links to the city, despite paying Edinburgh council tax rates, and they are not served by adequate superfast broadband. There are many other strains on those communities.
Anger and tension over development have been generated nowhere more than in and around the Cammo estate on the fringes of the Maybury bypass. The estate is one of the most beautiful sites of natural heritage on the eastern seaboard. For many years, developers have sought to develop on it, and people have rightly and successfully campaigned against it. However, we have now reached an impasse in which, very sadly, Cammo is now zoned for development as part of the local development plan. That outcome is the result of something of a betrayal of trust, which has left the local community reeling.
Last year, a capital coalition motion suggested that unwanted housing in that area could be jettisoned from the local development plan if the planners accepted the Gyle garden city in the development plan, against the advice of officials. However, because of the delay from the Scottish Government and dubiety about both the plans, they were both included and both areas will now be built on.
Building on the Cammo estate will lead to a massive loss of green belt, and to gridlock at Barnton on the fringes of the A90, which is one of the most polluted roads in Scotland. The garden city development would fall in the footprint of the Ladywell medical practice, which is already at capacity and which would, with an extra 4,000 patients, need to close its lists.
The Minister for Local Government and Housing rightly issued the City of Edinburgh Council with a stinging rebuke of the way in which it handled the local development plan, but all the developments that I have mentioned were taken through without a coherent strategy for infrastructure, roads or health centres, thereby compounding the problems that I have described.
Liberal Democrats are not ideologically opposed to new housing; I have articulated our city’s distinct need for it. We are simply opposed to unintelligent housing development—the development by increment that I have described. Those developments are now, more than ever, driven by developers’ business models rather than by the needs of the communities that they seek to serve. Indeed, the environment for development has changed; developers are far more likely to build detached and terraced houses and to sell the units as they go along, because that is how they sustain their business model. However, that approach has three particular drawbacks: it burns through the green belt; it creates properties of higher value, which means that even affordable properties in the area are still outwith the range of first-time buyers; and it encourages early occupancy of unfinished developments before the amenities for it are constructed, which exerts further pressure on existing infrastructure and amenities.