Chamber and committees

In that spirit of excitement, I thank the convener and the committee for the opportunity to speak today.

I speak in support of PE1864, which calls for communities to have a stronger role in planning decisions on onshore wind farms. As the MSP for Aberdeenshire West, I have received more contact on energy infrastructure than on any other issue. Rural communities are powerless when large-scale energy projects are proposed, and areas such as the Cabrach have been devastated by developments that have been imposed on them, despite strong and reasoned objections.

The petition seeks to democratise the planning system by preventing the energy consents unit from overruling local decisions, providing professional support to help communities to make submissions and appointing an independent advocate to ensure that inquiries are fair.

Currently, projects over 50MW bypass local authorities and go to the energy consents unit, which removes much-needed local influence from the decision-making process. That leaves underresourced rural communities with limited support struggling to navigate complex processes against well-resourced renewables companies.

By contrast, in England, developers must align with local plans and secure genuine community backing. In Scotland, engagement is often superficial and even successful local opposition is frequently overturned. Since 2023, despite strong local objections, a number of wind turbines have been approved by the energy consents unit against local community wishes—10 in Caithness, 26 in Aberdeenshire and 97 in Dumfries and Galloway.

The Hill of Fare proposal, which is currently the subject of a public inquiry, at which I spoke on Monday, illustrates the problem. A community survey that was carried out back in 2023 shows that only 11 per cent of residents supported the proposal, and a local group has spent three years preparing a gold-standard case with more than 1,500 objections. All six community councils have resoundingly rejected the proposal, as has Aberdeenshire Council on four separate occasions. At every level of elected representation, the project has been opposed and the community’s anger could not be clearer. Although we remain hopeful, the outcome of the inquiry is still uncertain at this point.

Communities should not feel powerless. They deserve to have a planning system in which they have a statutory voice. I urge the Scottish Government to adopt the proposed reforms and restore balance to the planning process. I ask for the support of the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee in advancing the petition.

Thank you. I am sure that we all hope that, too. We would certainly be grateful for more data on the expedite process.

How many of the 5,000-odd outstanding cases do you think have bespoke agreements?

Finally, when do you expect to be able to share that timetable with the committee? Would it be possible to show in your blog month-on-month or quarter-on-quarter improvements alongside some of those figures?

Yes, the 2017 backlog.

I alert members to my entry in the register of members’ interests.

I will start on a positive note: I have had some good feedback from professionals about some of the improvements to the service. I just wanted to pass that on. In a similar vein, I have to say that I am an avid reader of your blog, and I welcome your appearance before the committee and your willingness to share information today.

However, I hope that you will take away from this meeting the disappointment felt by the committee and by SPICe about a lack of transparency or willingness on your part to share some of your data beforehand. Indeed, the question that I would like to pursue now as a follow-up to Michelle Thomson’s questions on the back of Keith Robertson’s letter is about just that: what more data can we get?

For example, can you clarify whom the bespoke agreements are with? Are they with customers? Can you provide some sort of metric or key performance indicator for how many agreements there are and what timeframes are being agreed under them? Is it three months or a year? Are they all under a year, as you have said—and, if so, can we see that? Some of the data suggests that some cases might take 11 years. How can we see that happening?

The question, therefore, is: what further data can you share on those agreements? Also, does anybody have an appeal under them? Is it really a mutual agreement, or is it just dictated to customers?

But how many cases in the 2017 backlog have had bespoke agreements? I am not talking about the expedite process.

When do you expect to have an idea of that? You have said today that you expect all of them to be done within a year, but you have nothing to evidence that.

What more information can you provide on the detail of that backlog and when those cases will be completed?

Good morning. Why has the voucher scheme not worked as well as you might have hoped? Why was the uptake so low? I wrote to you about the possibility of extending the deadlines for that. There are questions about why some applications for vouchers were turned down and what will happen to the unspent money. I appreciate that you might not have all those figures in front of you. Will there be a formal report or analysis of the scheme, so that we can properly scrutinise why it did not work as well as it could have done?

Do you have an updated figure for the unspent money? I agree that you promoted the scheme—we all promoted the scheme to constituents—but, despite all the additional promotion and the extension, there was not a bigger uptake. What do you think was fundamentally wrong with the voucher scheme? People will not take something up if it is not attractive enough, so what was wrong with the scheme?