MP questions St Andrews 'call-ins'

The Citizen, 23 April 1999

North East Fife Liberal Democrat MP, Menzies Campbell, has questioned the wisdom of the action taken by Fife Council in “calling in” the planning applications at Kingask, Scooniehill, and Feddinch for determination by the Strategic Development Committee in Glenrothes.

Mr Campbell has raised his concerns in a letter to Dr John Markland, the council’s chief executive, in which he stated: “It now appears that the new Kingask application is to be called in, along with those for Scooniehill and Feddinch, and that decisions in relation to all of those applications are to be taken by the Strategic Development Committee.

“No strategic consideration of any application can properly take place without it being placed in a proper strategic context, and in the case of St Andrews this must include the proposal for a green belt - a proposal which, it will be recalled, received overwhelming public support in the St Andrews Structure Study.

“That study, as I understand it, was carried out in order to properly inform this review of the Fife Strategic Plan.

“If substantial development of this kind proposed were to be permitted, would not such permissions pre-empt both the Structural Plan Review and the proposal for a green belt?

“By way of illustration, let me put the following possible outcome. One or more of these proposals is granted permission. As a result of actual or potential traffic generation, the case for a St Andrews relief road is accepted and - as an inducement - developers offer such a road as so called “planning gain” in order to ensure permission is granted, or the council is persuaded to make the necessary investment.

“Evidence elsewhere suggests that the line of the road is often regarded as a defensible green belt boundary. The result would be that the delineation of the green belt for St Andrews would be dictated not by objective considerations but as a consequence of the granting of a planning permission. In short, the strategic issue would not have been determined by strategic considerations. This would be what is known as “planning by permission” which is objectionable in principle and which the Structure Plan system was designed to eliminate.”