On the 18th December we will be taking East Renfrewshire Council to Judicial Review in the court of session in an attempt to overturn the controversial BESS planning application in Eaglesham.
A previous planning application for this site had been rejected 4:2 and was subsequently upheld by the Scottish reporter who agreed that the site chosen was inappropriate because of the change of view from one of ‘ open countryside.’ This second planning application put in more screening – while the additional screening was still woefully inadequate to hide the industrial containers particularly in winter, we would argue that additional trees are only going to alter things even more from that vista.
There were some inexplicable occurrences at that second ERC planning application meeting- we honestly couldn’t believe the scene playing out before our eyes.
At the end of it, despite everyone who had been at both planning application meetings voting exactly the same way as before, we had a different outcome due to the presence of a different chair who had the casting vote and the absence of Cllr Edlin.
Cllr Paul Edlin was given 4 hours notice about the fact that Cllr Annette Ireland had contacted the councils chief lawyer the evening before saying that comments Cllr Edlin had made two weeks previously at a community council meeting were biased. He had no time to seek proper advice, get a chance to listen to the recording of what he said (the community council have unanimously said that he was not prejudiced) and was not told that he could defer the planning commitee meeting. It’s still a mystery (we have our suspicions) as to how Annette Ireland who was not at the meeting came to know that the BESS was discussed at all.
We didn’t take the decision to go to JR lightly but sought a legal opinion on whether we had a case. Our senior counsel Roddy Dunlop, dean of the faculty of advocates, has based our case on the fact that Cllr Edlin was ‘misdirected’ by Gerry Mahon the councils chief legal officer.
Our crowd justice campaign has now raised over £5500 to help towards to our legal costs- it only has one day left to fundraise.
We want to hold East Renfrewshire council to account over this. If anyone else would wish to donate please consider sparing what you can.
We’ll keep everyone updated on the outcome!!
0 Comments