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Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (Scotland) Amendment (No 2) Order 2014 (SSI 2014/300)
Item 3 is subordinate legislation. We will have an evidence-taking session on a negative instrument. Members have a cover paper from the clerk setting out the background to the instrument. The Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee did not draw any issues to our attention in relation to the instrument. Cameron Buchanan has lodged a motion to annul the instrument. We will consider that motion after the evidence session.
I welcome our witnesses, who are Alex Neil, Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Communities and Pensioners’ Rights; John McNairney, Scottish Government chief planner; David Reekie, planning performance division, Scottish Government; and Norman Macleod, director of legal services in the Scottish Government.
Cabinet secretary, do you have any opening remarks about this Scottish statutory instrument?
Yes. I will briefly try to set the SSI in the context of what we are trying to do. The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (Scotland) Amendment (No 2) Order 2014 introduces an approach that we think strikes an appropriate balance between the needs of local businesses and the protection of Scotland’s environment, amenity and heritage. Following public consultation in 2012, we have listened to industry concerns that the full removal of all permitted development rights for agriculture and forestry hill tracks would be disproportionate at this time. Instead, the order retains existing permitted development rights, subject to the introduction of a prior notification and approval process that allows planning authorities for the first time to intervene where appropriate and to do so proportionately to ensure that the design, siting and appearance of new tracks are acceptable.
We have also legislated to ensure that there will be no fee for prior notification and approval in relation to agricultural and forestry tracks. That is the overall setting for this SSI.
Thank you very much. Mr Buchanan, do you have any remarks or questions on the SSI?
Thank you. Is this where I can come in? Right. Good morning everybody. I lodged motion S4M-18842 to annul this—
We will come to that in item 4.
Oh. I knew I was out of order. Thank you.
If you want to ask any questions or make any remarks at this point, feel free to do so.
I have none. Sorry.
Stewart Stevenson has a question.
I have a couple of questions. The first one is on the provision for prior notification. Is that a provision that is already used elsewhere in the planning system, or is it novel in relation to hill tracks?
I think that it is used elsewhere in the planning system.
Yes. It is already used for agricultural and forestry buildings, and the proposition is to extend it to tracks.
That is helpful. We are not dealing with something that is novel; it is an established procedure that we are applying to a new area.
The second question is one that I do not know whether we can answer. If we cannot answer it, that may inform the way we deal with this. How many kilometres of new hill tracks are constructed each year?
Before I pass that question to David Reekie, I should say that, having some forestry ancestry myself, I am keen that we get this right for the forestry industry, which, after all, makes a huge contribution to the Scottish economy. Overall, we are trying to strike the right balance between ensuring that we have controlled sustainable development that is done properly and not imposing unnecessary burdens on the sector. Imposing such burdens would be crazy, given the sector’s enormous contribution to the Scottish economy.
When we talk about tracks in the forestry industry, we sometimes have the image of temporary roads that run for no more than a couple of miles to facilitate logging and the transport of logs. However, some of these roads are tarmacked. In Dumfriesshire, for example, there is a tarmacked road called the Ae link that is roughly 20 miles long and is named after a community in the area. Given that we are talking about a very important part of our environment, it seems reasonable to put appropriate and proportionate controls on such developments to ensure that they fit with our general approach to the rural environment.
I do not know whether David Reekie has the specific numbers to hand. If he does not, we will send them to you but, knowing David, I think that he might well have them ready.
I hate to disappoint the cabinet secretary, but I do not know the exact number of miles that are built every year.
As part of the engagement that we have had with stakeholders throughout the process, we have asked several stakeholders for estimates of the amount of tracks created. The first thing to say is that we are dealing not just with completely new tracks but with extensions to existing tracks. The Cairngorms National Park Authority estimated that there were roughly 800 existing tracks in its area, and it reckoned that roughly 80 new tracks or extensions would be built in a year. The Forestry Commission has estimated that between 1,000 and 2,500 new tracks, track alterations or track extensions are made each year.
Perhaps I might take that a step further by asking what is a track. In other words, are we talking about something that is designed for use by mechanical vehicles rather than, say, a walkers’ track? I want to be absolutely clear about what we are dealing with.
The word “track” does not appear in the general permitted development order; instead, it refers to “private ways”, which are defined as being either roads or footpaths. As a result, we are dealing with, at one extreme, footpaths and at the other, as the cabinet secretary has said, roads that allow heavy goods vehicles to extract large amounts of timber.
Thank you, convener.
As there are no more questions, we move to item 4, which is the debate on the motion to annul the order on which we have just taken evidence. Do any members wish to speak in the debate? I call Stewart Stevenson.
I had not expected to be the first speaker, convener, but I am delighted to be so.
Drawing on my experience as planning minister, an office that I demitted more than four years ago, I know that this issue has not arisen in the past few days, weeks or months, and it has clearly engaged quite a wide range of stakeholders. I am delighted that the order has been laid. It is not about our seeking to constrain or restrict the proper use of tracks for a wide range of purposes. One such purpose is forestry, as the cabinet secretary has pointed out, but there are others. For example, as we have identified, the order will cover tracks for pedestrians, and we should not fail to understand the significant impact that such tracks can have on the environment, particularly on some of our more popular hills. They can, for example, lead to significant erosion. Therefore, the order is a welcome step towards understanding the effects on our environment and the benefits that are derived from the construction of tracks in an area where there are such significant developments. Although they are estimates, the numbers that were provided were larger than I expected, to be candid about it, and indicate how important it is that we understand those points.
The important thing that I took from my questioning of the minister was that, in planning terms, there is nothing novel about the proposed approach. The agriculture sector is already subject to it. That sector has permitted development rights for agricultural buildings and developments and has continued to operate entirely satisfactorily and successfully while subject to the notification requirement.
I am not at all convinced that there will be any downside for those who make their living in the countryside and depend on the tracks, but I am convinced that having a properly recorded database as a result of prior notification of what is going on would have a significant benefit for our understanding of the environmental impacts. Therefore, I will not support the motion to annul and I encourage my colleagues on the committee to take the same position.
My reason for lodging the motion to annul is that forestry tracks have been lumped together with high-altitude road tracks, which is an unintended consequence of the legislation. There is already enough legislation concerning forestry tracks, and local authorities are consulted on all forestry applications anyway. The order just adds extra bureaucracy, which is not the intention. It should cover only agriculture, not forestry.
Forestry proposals have to go through a 28-day period on the public register before being signed off, so there is due warning, and Scottish Environment LINK said that forest roads have not been a problem until now. It is important not to go through a parallel planning process. Also, the Government promised that it would consult on the matter before the order came into force.
The inclusion of forest roads is an unintended consequence of the order. Therefore, I seek to have it annulled.
I move,
That the Local Government and Regeneration Committee recommends that the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (Scotland) Amendment (No. 2) Order 2014 (SSI 2014/300) be annulled.
Cameron Buchanan and I had a useful discussion yesterday and, since then, I have been doing some work on the points that he has legitimately raised. Even if members accepted everything that he said, to throw the baby out with the bathwater by annulling the SSI would be completely the wrong thing to do because of the huge consequences.
I will go through each of the points that Cameron Buchanan raised and deal with them.
The first concerns consultation. I will make a distinction between the consultation on the order
and the consultation on the guidance that will flow from the order once the committee has agreed it, as I hope it will.
We have consulted widely on the SSI with Confor and others. I have checked and can confirm that any commitments to consult on it have been kept. Furthermore, we have already started the consultation on the guidance. There was a seminar on consultation on the guidance on, I think, 11 December that involved Confor and others. Therefore, the commitments that Derek Mackay and Paul Wheelhouse made on consultation have been fulfilled.
The consultation on the guidance is not yet complete or exhausted. There will be other opportunities to contribute to it and I will ensure that every organisation with an interest in the matter has the opportunity to provide its input into the guidance. I am happy that we produce draft guidance before we finalise the guidance so that people can point out to us the unintended consequences in our draft when we give it to them.
I am totally committed to consultation because I want to get the legislation right. As I said at the start, we need to get a balance. We need proper control of our rural environment to ensure that it is sustainable in the long term but, at the same time, I do not want to impose unnecessary burdens on the industry and nor do I want to impose a planning system that is disproportionate to what we are trying to achieve. Therefore, I make it absolutely clear that, before I approve the guidance, I will need to be satisfied that we have given every opportunity for Confor and others to be heard and that any substantive points that they make have been taken into consideration.
09:45There is already a commitment that we will review the legislation after 12 months from the date of implementation. I have decided that that will be an independent review and will not just be done by the Government. I will appoint somebody who is independent and who has the relevant qualifications to review how the legislation is working and being implemented after it has been up and running for 12 months. That will allow us to quickly learn where anything is going wrong or where there are unintended consequences that need to be dealt with. I give that absolute commitment to the committee.
The second point that Cameron Buchanan raised related to the administrative burden. Substantial processes are already in place for foresters in relation to the plans that they have to submit to the Forestry Commission. I believe that the additional requirements that arise from the legislation are fairly proportionate, because much of the information is already available in the plans that foresters submit to the Forestry Commission. We have an arrangement with the Forestry Commission that it will make all that information available to the relevant planning authorities so that companies do not need to duplicate or repeat what they have already done with the Forestry Commission. The only additional work will be in providing any information that is required on top of what has already been submitted to the Forestry Commission. For example, companies submit a longer-term strategic plan to the Forestry Commission and, obviously, at some point a company might decide that it needs an additional or extended track that is not in the plan that it submitted. Obviously, that would require to go through the process under the new legislation.
As I have said three or four times, I am keen to ensure that the industry is satisfied that we are not introducing a lot of duplication and putting unnecessary burdens on it, and I will work with Cameron Buchanan and Confor on that—I am happy to involve myself in the process. This morning, I emphasised again to my officials that, when we produce the guidance and implement the legislation, it needs to be proportionate and sensible while achieving the objective of balanced development in our rural communities. We will work with the industry to ensure that there are no unintended consequences. If any arise, we will deal with them through the independent review, which will take place after 12 months, and get them sorted. I hope that the quality of the consultation will be such that no unintended consequences will in fact arise.
I ask Cameron Buchanan whether he wishes to press or withdraw motion S4M-18842.
In view of what the cabinet secretary has said, I seek to withdraw it.
Are members happy that the motion be withdrawn?
Members indicated agreement.
That is unanimously agreed. I thank members and the cabinet secretary. We will break for a couple of minutes.
09:48 Meeting suspended.
Before we move on, I confirm that now that motion S4M-18842 has been withdrawn, SSI 2014/300 remains in force. That concludes agenda item 4.
Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications and Deemed Applications) (Scotland) Amendment (No 2) Regulations 2014 (SSI 2014/301)
Charities Accounts (Scotland) Amendment (No 2) Regulations 2014 (SSI 2014/335)
Agenda item 5 is consideration of two instruments that are subject to negative procedure. Members have from the clerk a paper that sets out the purposes of the instruments. The Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee considered the instruments and has drawn to our attention several issues in relation to SSI 2014/335, which are set out in the cover paper from the clerk. Do members have any comments to make on the instruments or on the comments by the DPLR Committee?
I will make a brief comment on SSI 2014/301. The making of regulations on fees for applications and deemed applications is an annual event. The subject that I am about to raise is one that I first raised in 2003 and in which I continue to take an interest. The committee might care to consider it in some aspect of its future work.
I am not clear in my mind why local authorities are told centrally what they should be charging by way of planning fees. From a legal point of view, I know why that is the case—the relevant legislation requires the Government to set the fees—but there is nothing in the legislation to stop the Government setting the fees as a range from, for the sake of argument, 1p to £1 million. In an environment in which we want to ensure that our local authorities have maximum power to do what they decide is appropriate, it might be appropriate for the committee to include in its future work programme consideration of whether planning fees should be set centrally or by local authorities. If local authorities set them, the more efficient authorities would have a competitive edge and the less efficient authorities would have an incentive to improve.
I welcome your input. That issue has been touched on previously by the committee and I think that it is one that we should look at the next time we consider planning. I imagine that other members agree that it would be appropriate for us to do so at that juncture.
Does the committee agree not to make any recommendations to Parliament on either instrument?
Members indicated agreement.