Seòmar agus comataidhean

Thank you. I am pleased to be able to join you, convener.

Dr Pathirana, my colleague Liz Smith said that some of your communications are vague. I put it to you that they are actually quite cold. You are very process driven—it is all about calculators, statistics and how many cases there are. Someone might be sitting at home feeling stressed because this is consuming their life and potentially consuming valuable time during their retirement, but your communications do not recognise the frustration or anger that people rightly feel.

You also said that you write back to people when they raise concerns with you. I have done that as an MSP, and I feel that I have been fobbed off. I get letters back that say that you will speak to the constituent. The constituent then gets a phone call from someone in the organisation, who says that they are getting a phone call because their MSP has written a letter, but they do not get any answers to their actual queries. It is like a tick-box exercise, so that you can then write back and say that you have done it, by speaking to someone and telling them the same information.

That is what worries me with regard to the point that Michael Marra made about individual escalations. You say that people can escalate their concerns, but when they do so, they get back two or three letters—or what might be called communications—that tell them just the same thing again, and the matter does not move past go.

10:30

You will not be able to give them the remedy.

None. Okay—that is fine.

In order for engagement to be meaningful, there has to be the potential for the developer to walk away at an early stage. That is the problem. Ultimately, many developers engage, get an answer that they do not like and then keep going. Do you recognise that there are occasions when developers should walk away? There are examples of developers lodging repeat applications, which have been knocked back, even by the Scottish Government energy consents unit. The same developers then come back a few years later with a slightly different proposal for the same land, and the process starts all over again.

—and communities turn up in good faith, without proper representation or a detailed understanding of the law. To be fair, I think that the reporters do an excellent job in trying to level the playing field. I have seen people in my own community turn up and talk about businesses that they have had for a lifetime and how they serve tourism; landowners, farmers and other local people talk about their knowledge of the hills and the water; and others talk about the impact of light at night on their residential amenity, why they moved to a particular area and what makes it special.

People certainly do not move to many of these remote communities for the bus service, for access to a general practitioner, or in order to be able to go to the cinema. They move there because there is something special about the landscape, and then people who are paid a small fortune come in and tell them that that is nonsense. They humiliate them; they make them feel small; and they make them feel as if those things do not matter.

It is plain to those who live in these communities. You cannot build hundreds of turbines that are 200m-plus tall, with red lights that flash at night, and then tell people, “It’s not going to affect how you feel about where you live” or “It’s not going to have an effect on your home.” However, that is what developers do to try to convince the reporter that they are right and that the community council and all these local people are wrong.

Yes—I am grateful to you, convener, and to committee members for making space for me to ask a couple of quick questions. I wanted to come in on the back of what Maurice Golden asked in relation to when communities say no. I also want to link to the point about leaving a bad taste in communities.

It is not just developers that are at fault; it is also the Scottish Government. Communities’ views are discounted in the planning process or given lower priority. The system is fundamentally stacked in favour of developers. Having sat through inquiries, I know exactly how communities feel. People turn up in flash suits and flash cars.

They sweep into communities for weeks at a time; they sit there and tell local people that they are not entitled to a view; they go through, in a dispassionate way, units of land on a map; and they tell people that the effects of these enormous wind farms are not significant, that there is nothing special about the local landscape, and that, for planning consideration to be given to local landscapes and communities, the effects must be more than local.

These are people’s homes and communities that we are talking about—this is where people live—and they are told that their views do not matter. They spend a huge amount of time participating; as Fergus Ewing pointed out, community councils put in long and detailed objections, highlighting why the projects are unsuitable, and at the end of the process, people say, “Well, that’s not part of the process. It doesn’t matter. Those views don’t count for anything.”

My question, then, is this: would it not just be more honest to tell communities, “The system works as intended, and the Scottish Government favours going ahead with these projects, no matter what”?

Yes. They swoop in with teams of 10 or 15 people and spend what I think would be hundreds of thousands of pounds to push these applications through—

But if the reporter can look only at effects that are beyond the local, or at things that have been set out under the planning terms, they are not able to listen to the community’s concerns. They say, “We’ve gone through these land units, and some experts have said that they’re not of national significance.” The units might be of regional significance, and there might be pockets within them that are worth protecting, but the reporter has to take that broader look—and that, in effect, means discounting local views. Those local views do not have a place in the process, because of the rules that have been put in place.

Yes—I am grateful to you, convener, and to committee members for making space for me to ask a couple of quick questions. I wanted to come in on the back of what Maurice Golden asked in relation to when communities say no. I also want to link to the point about leaving a bad taste in communities.

It is not just developers that are at fault; it is also the Scottish Government. Communities’ views are discounted in the planning process or given lower priority. The system is fundamentally stacked in favour of developers. Having sat through inquiries, I know exactly how communities feel. People turn up in flash suits and flash cars.

They sweep into communities for weeks at a time; they sit there and tell local people that they are not entitled to a view; they go through, in a dispassionate way, units of land on a map; and they tell people that the effects of these enormous wind farms are not significant, that there is nothing special about the local landscape, and that, for planning consideration to be given to local landscapes and communities, the effects must be more than local.

These are people’s homes and communities that we are talking about—this is where people live—and they are told that their views do not matter. They spend a huge amount of time participating; as Fergus Ewing pointed out, community councils put in long and detailed objections, highlighting why the projects are unsuitable, and at the end of the process, people say, “Well, that’s not part of the process. It doesn’t matter. Those views don’t count for anything.”

My question, then, is this: would it not just be more honest to tell communities, “The system works as intended, and the Scottish Government favours going ahead with these projects, no matter what”?