Chamber and committees

Carole Williams submission of 18 August 2021

PE1864/UUUU: Increase the ability of communities to influence planning decisions for onshore windfarms

I totally support this petition and hope that it will lead to better representation of community views in the future, with better resourcing and advocacy.

A wind farm application for a 75 mega-turbine development, 3 miles from my home, is currently in consultation. Our volunteer Community Council which consisted of five people, tasked with the duty of “representing” the community and giving a statutory response admitted they had neither the expertise, nor the manpower, nor the financial resources to do so.

It totally unacceptable to consider this a democratic way of responding to a developer who appears to have unlimited resources. Whilst this application is still in consultation, this developer has already spent untold amounts of money on full-page advertisements in the local newspaper, offering our community “prizes” for submitting the best ideas on how to spend community benefits. They have visited our local schools “gifting” laptops, and promoting prize competitions on renewable energy projects, under the guise of “education”. They offered to provide funding for a post-covid gala day in the town. All of this taking place during the application process., The headline in our local paper this week now claims they are offering to fund a swimming pool should the application go ahead. They are “buying” the town, pure and simple. Quite contrary to the good practice principles laid down by the Scottish Government. I believe that it is shameful and farcical in equal measure.

Over the past 14 months I have become involved in a volunteer group seeking to better inform our community of some of the facts pertaining to this industrial-scale development which is likely to negatively impact our wildlife, our tourism and our environmental situation. These facts are indeed contained in the developer’s application documents but you need to be Sherlock Holmes and/or a wind farm expert to find your way through the highly technical reports, which amount to thousands of pages. Not everyone has online access or the requisite skill to interpret the application material in computerised format. Yet this has been the only option during Covid lockdown. When attempting to summarise, simplify and present various aspects of this information via our website, leaflets and an exhibition to our local populace, we have met with claims by the developer and their third-party contractors about copyright violation, obviously intended to intimidate us.

During the course of informing myself about wind farms, I have learned:

> That our Local Planning officials are inundated with wind farm applications.

> That these officials cannot produce their responses anywhere near the timescale being expected.

> That my local councillor did not understand the planning process of Section 36 applications and actually knew less than me.

> That research, as commissioned by the Scottish Government, on the impact of onshore wind farms on tourism and on property devaluation is shockingly out of date and has not kept pace with the proliferation of turbines across Scotland.

Based on my experience, it is my fervent opinion that:

1. Our planning processes need to be reviewed urgently and like in England allow local communities that will be affected by these developments to have the final say on their planning application.

2. Local stakeholder groups such as, but not exclusively, Community Councils need access to legal support and expertise if they are to have any hope of having a balanced discussion with their communities and wind farm developers.

3. Government research requires urgent updating to keep pace with the speed of wind farm development, if we are not to be overrun with one source of renewable energy at the expense of other more acceptable and perhaps more suitable alternatives.

I would be happy to appear before any Committee that wishes to hear first-hand the effort required to achieve any kind of democratic balance in attempting to understand the implications of large scale onshore wind farm development in one’s immediate neighbourhood. We all appreciate the urgency of climate change and the need to consider renewable energy alternatives in Scotland and beyond. However, the speed of this type of development is far outpacing the environmental and socio-economic research that should accompany it. I truly fear that current Scottish Government policy is outdated and misguided and we will not realise its folly until it is too late. That is to say, if it is not already the case.