In response to the piece on community benefit and Newburgh Community Trust;
Murdo Fraser is calling a spade a spade.
Community benefit is an inducement to buy support for a planning
application and is one way of trying to make an unacceptable proposal
acceptable.
Whether the money comes from the developer as a community benefit or to a
community trust in grants to process an application for their own wind
turbine or farm the public always pays one way or another.
The Newburgh Community Trust’s efforts to become a wind farmer were doomed
from the outset by proceeding with an overblown project on an extremely
sensitive site and the best part of £300,000 of taxpayers’ money was
squandered on consultants.
That sum was in the form of a soft loan. Win planning permission and pay it
back or fail and the loan is written off. The same sort of money is being
“invested” by the Scottish Government on similarly daft schemes.
One is at Tillyrie near Milnathort on a site where previous applications
have been refused planning permission and an appeal dismissed by a Scottish
Government Reporter.
Not much joined-up thinking there, then.
And over in Argyll a similar grandiose scheme near Cove has just been
recommended by planners for refusal but not before a packet of all our
money has been gobbled up getting it to this stage.
Another thing that is unpleasant about community benefit is that it can be
extremely divisive and divide communities rather than bringing them together.
Graham Lang.
Westermost,
Coaltown of Callange,
Ceres, Cupar.
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