Good Practice Principles for Community Benefits (Consultation Response)

Politicians and policy-makers like community benefit for obvious reasons. However, the experience of communities who receive it is much less happy. While there is no doubt community benefit has done some good, and there are cases where it could be said to have ‘worked’, our experience is overwhelmingly negative.

Far from achieving “building trust and understanding locally about the renewables development more widely” or “engagement in and commitment to local renewable energy developments”, in our view community benefit is a significant factor in creating mistrust of, and hostility towards, wind developers in particular, and wind development in general. Wind applications and community benefit have been responsible for damaging community relations and community participation in many areas in Scotland.

The main problem with community benefit is that developers, understandably perhaps, want and expect something in return. While they may acknowledge that community benefit is not a material planning consideration and deny that it is a bribe, they nevertheless treat it as a tool in a campaign to win support, and ultimately planning consent, for their application. Indeed, applicants may well emphasize that community benefit is entirely voluntary – ie. entirely at the discretion of the developer – but the implication is that if a community does not play ball (ie. support the application), it could be withdrawn. One developer we know of retracted his offer of community benefit (which the local CDT had accepted) after his proposal was objected to by the relevant community council and then refused by the local planning committee, on the grounds that he could no longer afford the promised community benefit as he had to cover the costs of an appeal.

It is not unusual for a wind developer’s first approach to a community about a proposed development to consist of a community benefit offer; we have been present at community council meetings where a developer’s PR company introduces his proposal to a community with a request that the community compile a wish-list of community activities, schemes etc it desires and which community benefit could fund. The use of professional lobbying and PR companies to handle ‘negotiations’ with the community about community benefit indicates how wind developers regard community benefit as a campaign tool.

Read the full consultation response: Good Practice Principles for Community Benefits (Consultation Response) – (PDF)