Meeting of the Parliament 11 June 2025
I am afraid that I do not have time at this point, but I would be happy to take the member’s intervention in closing.
Why is it a major development? We are talking about two hotels, a water park, a monorail, 372 parking spaces, 100 lodges, restaurants, shops, service buildings and more. The developer’s own impact assessment showed that there would be more than 250 additional car journeys per hour on local roads at peak times. Those local roads are already gridlocked the second that there is a crack of sunshine between the clouds, and, as Jackie Baillie highlighted, the developer was proposing only two minor roundabout adaptations to compensate for that.
The minister said that the planning process needs to “balance competing interests”, but I point out that the aims of our national parks are set out in law, including the Sandford principle that greater weight must be given to the protection of natural heritage over other aims, including economic benefit. I think that the economic benefits of the application are dubious at best, but they are cancelled out by the environmental and community harms that the application itself concedes would happen. Those harms are well evidenced by the Woodland Trust and by the national park’s own planning team in particular. The loss of ancient woodland, in and of itself, should have resulted automatically in the reporter dismissing the appeal.
The law is absolutely clear when aims conflict, which is the key reason why the national park board rejected the application, and it is to the credit of all who have campaigned locally and nationally over the past decade—and, in particular, over the past three weeks—that we have forced the decision. I also thank ministers for the change in their decision.
Flamingo Land’s application is of national significance because of the scale of the proposed development, the damage that it would do and its location, but also because of the precedent that it would set for our whole planning system. I look forward to setting out in detail the decade’s-worth of evidence against the mega resort. I am sure that, when ministers see the damage that it would do, they will reject the application, end the sorry saga and, once and for all, save Loch Lomond from the greed of the developer.
I move amendment S6M-17862.2, to insert at end:
“; believes that the significant public interest in this application and its location within a national park make it a matter of national interest, and asks that ministers assess the application’s compatibility with National Planning Framework 4, as approved by the Parliament in 2023, and with the statutory aims of the national park.”
Motions, questions or amendments mentioned by their reference code.
- S6M-17862.2 Planning Motion