Local voices are most important in planning, but are never listened to KIM LONG
THIS week I learned more about the planning system – what is allowed to be built in our city, where it will be built, and what it looks like. Multinational chain Starbucks are trying to build a drivethrough coffee shop right next to some flats in Dennistoun, ignoring the residential nature of the area, so I’ve been supporting local people to make their opinions known.
Planning applications can have an enormous impact on a local community, and yet the decisions system couldn’t make it more difficult for those communities to have their voices heard. If you get a letter, or see a notice posted on a lamp post, it’s written in difficult technical language. Then you have to log onto the council website – so you need a device, internet access, money to pay energy bills and enough digital literacy to get there – and download technical drawings of the application that can be gobbledegook to everyone who’s not an architect.
Even if you write an objection, you won’t get notified when the proposal is
agreed, withdrawn or refused, or when it’s coming to committee for a decision. Applications are often withdrawn and then brought back some time later, which means that all the original objections are deleted – handy you want to get your proposal through.
Most people can’t engage with the planning system, they don’t know where to start, don’t feel confident, or don’t trust that it will make any difference. Communities with more poverty, worse health, the least disposable time, are therefore at the mercy of developers who know they won’t get many objections.
If a decision goes against them, local communities have no right to appeal, but developers do. Scottish Greens tried to change this rule, but the SNP teamed up with the Tories to block it. We need to do better than this.
And of course, why is the council recommending approval of a drive-through at all, when we’ve declared a climate crisis? We need to make our city better for walking, wheeling and cycling – for lower carbon emissions, and because over half the people in Glasgow don’t own a car. We should be prioritising better public transport and safer cycle lanes, not saying yes to opportunistic nonsense that only serves car culture.
We are the city that is to host the world’s climate summit in just a few months’ time. A credible response to climate emergency must be woven into all the different systems that make up the considerable influence the council wields over Glaswegian lives.
We shouldn’t have to spend this much energy to resist an unwelcome planning application; it should have been given short shrift at the very beginning. With just a decade to save the planet from irreversible, catastrophic temperature rises, we don’t have time for these tiny fights.
THE GREEN VIEW if