The rules must not be for companies to write themselves
Scotland is a wilderness when it comes to planning law, and this is especially true when it comes to planning our renewables transition.
News breaks today that a very respected and senior member of one of Scotland’s planning bodies, the Royal Town Planning Institute, has resigned after the Institute accepted sponsorship from one of Scotland’s largest energy developers, SSEN, while the institute’s members within the Scottish Government are expected to make a ruling on a £29 billion transmission line project owned by the company.
This sponsorship deal obviously places RTPI at risk of a conflict of interest over its assessments of the plan, so it is very understandable that some members would have concerns serious enough to consider their own membership.
The pattern throughout Scotland is very similar. Large companies exert a lot of power and spend a lot of money to be able to set their own agenda and to write their own rules. The Scottish Government is quite happy to let them. Especially in the current environment where “inward investment” is just about the only game in town in terms of economic development (though in this case the company involved is just about the only Scottish-owned company involved in the energy sector).
There’s no strategic planning in Scotland’s energy transition, merely individualised projects being judged on “their own merits” without any kind of sense of what is happening as a whole, how the projects connect to others, or how much it actually contributes to the overall goals of transition.
This is how we can end up with a situation where we have approvals for renewable projects and battery farms springing up in places where communities are least able to object or to shape the projects to their own benefit; we have transmission line projects that have no real idea of how much energy they need to carry and to where; we have offshore wind plans like ScotWind that have no plan for getting the energy on shore - never mind to folks’ houses, and we have data centre proposals that would wipe out all of the gains of the renewable transition if even a fraction of them are built.
In a country where we took our energy transition seriously, we would be doing serious strategic-level planning to ensure that the projects work together for the benefit of all of us. Common Weal argued for this kind of planning when we proposed a Scottish Energy Development Agency in a motion that passed SNP conference overwhelmingly back in 2019. The policy also made it into the 2019 proposal from the Scottish Greens for a Green New Deal, meaning that for over half a decade there have been enough votes in the Scottish Parliament to launch the agency at any time. The Government has done no serious work on doing so.
Until we have such an agency, planning will continue to be done on an ad hoc basis, meaning that it will remain far too easy for companies to set the agenda and write their own rules. What is striking about the report today is how every official body involved is trying to distance itself from taking responsibility. This is how the elites rule Scotland. They set things up so that everything that benefits them is inevitable, everything that doesn’t is impossible, nothing that goes wrong is their fault, and no one can be blamed when you are wronged.
This needs to change.