Planning East Lothian style-

Just one of many letters in the Berwickshire about planning permission being given for another wind farm in the Lammermuirs.


I write regarding the astonishing method by which East Lothian Council’s so-called planning committee managed to push through the extremely controversial application made by a developer to build yet another eyesore wind farm on the now turbine-saturated eastern Lammermuir Hills.
This committee astonished all those who have been following this application (including visibly, I might add, the developers themselves) when they carried out one of the biggest acts of daylight stupidity last week by deliberately disregarding the East Lothian planning officer’s two year long study into the application.
The planning officer recommended very firmly that the application to build the highly visible wind farm should be rejected on many grounds including, but not limited to, the irreversible landscape damage that will now follow and also the completely unacceptable visual impact the scheme will have on the rest of us for at least the next 25 years (when theoretically they will all be taken down, very amusing).
The planning officer’s recommendation firmly to reject the application was the product of two years of expensive (taxpayer funded) and expert input from the planning department.
At the whitewash hearing in Haddington, the chief of the planning department was quite literally left holding his head in disbelief as he registered the total disregard shown by the chairman and his allies as they chose to ignore the key professional facts.
One unbelievable matter (so far suppressed in the local and national media, but it will be interesting to see if it is recorded in the official minutes) which emerged during the meeting was that only five of the 13 members of this committee had bothered to attend the official site visit which took place five days prior to the hearing.
That means that eight of the 13 members did not attend.
In other words, in respect of East Lothian’s first ever full wind farm application which now represents a blot on the landscape that most of this part of Scotland will have to look at for the next quarter century, over 60% of the decision makers had not bothered to visit, and stand on, the very ground where this monster development is now to be located.
Am I alone in thinking that this must surely constitute one of the most offensive and outrageous neglects of duty of any planning committee in the history of planning in East Lothian?
NEIL REYNOLDS,
Oldhamstocks House,
Oldhamstocks.


He may be right and I do not really recommend him moving south into Berwickshire in the expectation that planning issues would be considered any better.

They won't.

And with Big Jim Conundrum deputy chair of the SBC planning committee it is not likely things will improve.

Good voters of Eastern Berwickshire do your duty.  ¶ 8:01 AM