Answers sought over lack of Blàr Mòr liaison group
Highland Council is being asked to explain why, more than two years after planning consent was granted for the large Blàr Mòr development on the outskirts of Fort William, a stipulated condition that a community liaison group must be formed at the start of the project was apparently never complied with.
Acting chairman of Kilmallie Community Council John Hutchison told this week’s meeting of the community body that the apparent omission had only come to his attention after a brief remark from someone.
Mr Hutchison has now written to Highland Council chief executive Donna Manson seeking an explanation.
He told Ms Manson: ‘We have been in touch with you previously on this matter but I am now writing to ask the more serious question of why the Highland Council is not implementing planning conditions it has imposed on itself.’
More than a year ago, the community council had asked the Inverness-headquartered authority to involve it as it started to translate the broad Fort William 2040 project aspirations into tangible objectives for development on the Blàr Mòr through preparing an integrated layout and design guidance for individual sites.
However, Mr Hutchison informed Ms Manson there had been no response to that request, despite Caol and Mallaig Ward councillors also raising the issue with her and planning officers.
‘We have felt continually excluded from this major development,’ writes Mr Hutchison.
In the planning decision notice of December 19 2018, the relevant attached condition stipulates that ‘no development shall commence until a community liaison group is established by the developer, in collaboration with The Highland Council, Lochaber Access Panel and affected local community councils’.
Discussing the issue with fellow Kilmallie Community Council members at their Zoom meeting this week, Mr Hutchison said he considered the council’s failure to set up a liaison group as ‘pretty serious’.
He added that the community council had been trying to engage with Highland Council on the project for the last two or three years to no avail.
‘I am extremely disappointed, to say the least, to find that the council was actually meant to put in place a community liaison group,’ said Mr Hutchison, who has also written separately to Malcolm MacLeod, the council’s executive chief officer for infrastructure and environment, to ask if the other suspensive conditions attached to the planning consent – conditions which prevent any future actions until they are implemented – have been complied with.
Mr Hutchison continued: ‘This is the biggest development to take place here for a long, long time. So it is really pretty poor that this is the situation in which we find ourselves due to a chance comment.’
Asked to comment, Highland Council told the Lochaber Times: ‘We aim to establish a community liaison group to continue constructive discussions with the community, through the community council and other stakeholders.’