29 May 2025: After an announcement that a Scottish Government reporter intends to grant permission for the holiday park at Loch Lomond, Professor Mark Stephens writes about the democracy of planning decisions, reflecting on his role in a successful campaign against a quarry in New Lanark, and the question of whether planning is political.

Blog by Professor Mark Stephens, Ian Mactaggart Chair in Land, Property & Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow

On 16 May a Reporter from the Scottish government’s Planning and Environmental Appeals Division announced that he was “minded” to grant planning permission for the development of a holiday park by Flamingo Land at Loch Lomond.

The Green MSP, Ross Greer, described the decision as “an anti-democratic outrage.”

The local Community Council was even stronger in its condemnation. It was “a fundamental failure of democracy and policy.”

Such expressions of dismay sit uneasily with the popular perception that all it takes is for a few NIMBYS to set up an online petition to bring development to a halt.

There are, for example, signs that UK Government’s identification of planning as a key barrier to growth is being picked up by here, with Scottish Labour’s economy spokesman, Daniel Johnson, claiming, “Our underperforming planning system is turning away vital investment.”

Few members of the public have much of an understanding of the planning system until confronted with a planning application that they feel fundamentally threatens their community.

Some have come to me because I led the ultimately successful campaign to prevent the Mexican multinational, Cemex, from expanding a quarry into the Buffer Zone of the New Lanark World Heritage Site at the Falls of Clyde.

They may have been told – patronisingly – that they can’t object just because they don’t like an application. They must do so on planning grounds.

So they look up the local development plan, and compare it to the application, and identify policies that the application appears to violate.

“Ah, but it’s a discretionary planning system,” they are then told. An application may contradict policies in the local plan, but it can be allowed anyway if there are “material” reasons to allow it.

They will seek to meet their councillors. If they’re fortunate they will get a hearing, but it’s not unusual for councillors to refuse to meet their constituents, claiming – erroneously – that they are not permitted to do so because of their quasi-judicial role on the planning committee.

They may rejoice when the council – or in the Flamingo Land case, the national park – rejects the application, only to find that the applicant has appealed to DPEA – the arm of government that handles appeals –  whose “unelected” Reporter might overturn the decision of “elected” councillors.

If, however, they are disappointed by the local planning authority’s decision to allow a development, they will find there is no right of appeal for the public.

Understandably, to the objectors it will seem very unfair, more so when – as is the case with Flamingo Land – Scottish Ministers have “no intention” of calling-in the application to make the final decision themselves.

The dynamics in the New Lanark case were different.

There, councillors approved the application on a split vote. I was given just five minutes in which to put our case to the committee. None of the councillors who voted for the application felt moved to speak in its favour. They left that to the planning officers. When the Chair of the Committee lifted his hand in support of the application, his party colleagues obediently followed. It didn’t feel very democratic.

Scottish Ministers made the highly unusual decision to “call-in” the application. We began with the huge disadvantage that Historic Scotland had somehow found itself compromised having actively facilitated the application during its early stages. But we had built up a coalition of community and heritage bodies to provide a credible case that had also elicited widespread opposition – elicited as paper letters (not an online petition) from local people or people visiting the area.

We also pulled apart the applicant’s economic case which was based on exaggerated predictions of the demand for minerals.

In contrast to the Flamingo Land case, Ministers made the decision to overturn the Reporters’ recommendation to grant full permission, and instead blocked the quarry’s extension into the Buffer Zone.

The only hope now for the opponents of Flamingo Land – beyond a failure of the applicant to reach an agreement with the park authority in line with the Reporter’s findings – is to seek judicial review to challenge the legality of the decision.

This is the route Cemex went down after Ministers’ first decision against them. Ministers did not contest it and the application went back to Reporters. The second time Ministers constructed a bomb-proof rationale for their decision, and there was no appeal.

One commentor wondered if the decision was “just evidence that planning is political.”

Of course. It always will be.

The primary planning legislation in Scotland pre-dates devolution.

That cases like Flamingo Land and New Lanark recur – and as policy developments in England will inevitably influence what happens here – suggest it’s high time we had a public debate about what kind of planning system we want.

Author

Mark Stephens is Ian Mactaggart Chair in Land, Property & Urban Studies. He is chair of Save Our Landscapes, and an advisor to Planning Democracy. 

Preview image by Elizabeth Glen on Unsplash

First published: 28 May 2025

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