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Communities Committee, 27 Sep 2006

27 Sep 2006 · S2 · Communities Committee

Item of business

Planning etc (Scotland) Bill: Stage 2

Gorrie, Donald LD Central Scotland Watch on SPTV

Mike Rumbles and Sandra White have covered a lot of the arguments for a third-party right of appeal. Amendment 251 tries to keep to what I think is the basic irreducible minimum that should be allowed. It therefore contains constraints on why an appeal can be made and on who can appeal.There are two issues on which there should be a right of appeal. The first is where the local authority has a significant interest, either because it owns the ground in question or because it is part of a consortium that is involved in the proposed development. The second is where there is a major breach of the strategic or local development plan. Amendment 251 is limited to those two issues.In both instances, it is fair to say that the council should not be the final arbiter in a decision that affects its own ground or activities and from which it can benefit. The council has a plan on which it has consulted, so if it is going to support a major breach of that plan, it should not be the final court of appeal if there should be an appeal against that breach.Amendment 251 goes on to say that the appeal would have to be made by a community council or other recognised community body. I have taken the definition of "community body" from the section in the bill on good neighbour agreements, which contains a bit about community bodies and trusts. I am trying to establish that a genuine local body that speaks for local people—albeit not all local people, because opinions are often divided—could appeal. If the planning authority voted to grant planning permission under the circumstances that I have outlined, a community body would be able to appeal to the minister. The community body would have to set out the ways in which, in its view, the development would harm the community, why it was an important breach of the development plan, whether the consultation was adequate and whether some changes to the development would make it satisfactory. Quite often, an objection is to aspects of a development rather than to the whole thing.When all that was set out to the minister, the minister would judge local public opinion. Although the appeal might come from a bona fide community body, lots of other groups, individual members of the public who are not organised into groups or other local authorities might have a different view relevant to the case. The minister would also have to examine the planning authority's reasons for granting planning permission. All those factors would have to be weighed up; the minister would then decide whether to call in the application and have a proper inquiry.Amendment 251 deals with the issue as basically as possible. It would not cause hundreds of appeals that would bring the planning system to a halt. It would not allow one or two nimbys to stop everything. An appeal would have to come through a genuine community effort and have genuine arguments.I hope that the committee will accept amendment 251, but it is fine if members want to improve bits of it. The Executive's consultation on the third-party right of appeal showed that opinion was polarised, but there are very strong opinions among individuals, community groups, amenity bodies and people involved in that part of society that they should have some right of appeal.However good the proposed system of scrutinising plans at an earlier stage, there should be an ultimate right of appeal to deal with situations in which things have gone wrong, especially if the council has been the judge in its own case. I hope that the committee will look favourably on amendment 251.

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Communities Committee, 27 Sep 2006

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