Planning promises get wilder and yet still we swallow them

There is a cluster of issues which regularly occur together. They are 'planning decisions', 'major infrastructure developments' and 'remarkable claims about jobs and supply chains'. Yet repeatedly, these claims have turned out to be little more than wishful thinking.

It is happening again today. We see again that there is a call to simplify and speed up Scotland's planning system because it is harming 'job creation' and this is occurring next to calls for more data centres – and a loose proposal that if we approve data centres, it will result in 'vast quantities' of tomatoes.

Is any of this credible? There used to be a much more marked critique of the promises of property development. In the 1990s, when the modern property industry was developing, there was a much sharper awareness of how much of it was a game of public relations.

The tools of the era were the economic impact assessment, the business plan and the artist’s impression. Between them, they painted a picture of a prosperous, beauty-filled future of wealth and leisure. Politically, that is what propped up, for example, the rapid development of shopping malls.

Has the proliferation of shopping malls resulted in wealth? Most certainly. Property developers became some of the wealthiest people in the country. But it has also resulted in the proliferation of low-pay, insecure service and retail jobs. The wealth has not been spread.

More importantly, most of the evidence suggests that shopping malls don't create new employment; they just displace jobs elsewhere in the local economy. This has the effect of concentrating wealth in the hands of the property developer, which is generally bad for the local economy.

Likewise, few would credit most shopping malls with having greatly improved the local physical environment. It is hard to stack up any of the claims that were made about them in advance, and there is no mechanism or methodology for requiring them to live up to the promises.

That is the problem with the property speculation industry – it is almost explicitly predicated on making promises it doesn't intend to deliver on. And it is not just property speculation. We have just been informed that the promises of jobs and prosperity from ScotWind licensing have evaporated. The wind turbine industry is just a form of property development, and there we were promised 28,000 jobs in offshore wind by now. We got (at a generous assessment) 3,000.

There is a massive underdelivery of promised jobs, the supply chain commitments made are a fraction of what was promised and yet, as far as we can tell (we have submitted a Freedom of Information request), none of those failing to deliver supply chain commitments has had sanctions promised beforehand imposed.

With much of the public sceptical about the unsubstantiated claims of the property development industry, the Scottish Government made much of the fact that it was writing fines into the legislation. Not only did we have the government's word that jobs would arrive, but they had given themselves the power to punish those who didn't deliver.

But the fines were paltry, and it doesn't seem like they have been used anyway. This rather exposes the contradictions in property development – everyone involved all but knows that the promises are a fiction, there only to ease through the decision.

The failures are always placed at the door of the planning system, but when the planning system is relaxed as developers demand, they do not subsequently live up to the promises they made. They promise more affordable housing, but housing has become more expensive. They promise manufacturing jobs that don't arrive.

And now they are promising us tomatoes. One developer has decided that artists’ impressions of data centres and claims of jobs are not enough. He wants to use the waste heat from data centres to create vast heated poly tunnels for tomatoes.

Setting aside that for much of the year in Scotland, there aren't enough hours of sunlight to grow tomatoes, irrespective of the heat, what likelihood is there that approving these data centres will actually result in vast quantities of tomatoes being grown in Scotland connected to 'truly green' data centres? Common Weal remains sceptical.

The planning system is based on inflated PR claims that are seldom delivered. Developers base their business model on delivering much less than they promise. The information to back this up is extensive and well-known. It is a desperate economy which is wilfully deceived in pursuit of nothing more than promises of future economic growth.

Data centres are no more than the latest iteration of this mutually-agreed confidence trick. We already know they are massively under-delivering on their promises – but reality never seems to get in the way of property development.