Fife planning mess waiting to be sorted out

Dr Frank Riddell, Letter to Editor, The Courier, 5 March 2001

Sir, - I am amazed at the comments made by Cllr Bill Kay (March 1) claiming no resemblance between Scooniehill and Kingask: “It is absolutely wrong to compare Kingask and Scooniehill and presuppose the outcome of a public inquiry. These were two very different planning applications”.

What a pity Mr Kay didn’t read the reporter’s overwhelming rejection of the Scooniehill planning appeal.

Irrespective of the differences between the two applications, paragraph 66 of the Scooniehill reporter’s decision is directly relevant.

He makes it clear that in areas of great landscape value, environmental policies should take precedence over economic policies.

Economic policies were used, wrongly as the reporter makes clear, as the driving force to push through Kingask.

The reporter also makes it clear that the visual impact upon St Andrews is a deciding criterion and also that such hotel/accommodation developments should be located within the urban envelope and not in the countryside.

Both of these planning policies were relevant and were deliberately ignored in the Kingask debacle.

These criteria would certainly have resulted in a Public Inquiry rejecting Kingask before other items such as traffic flow and the now trashed SSSI came into play to support rejection.

Councillors are there to defend the public and the environment of Fife from faulty decisions by their officials. Cllr Kay should now be asking why his officials got it so spectacularly wrong on Scooniehill and, by implication, on Kingask.

He should realise that the loss of confidence in Fife Council’s planning department is widespread.

There is a mess there waiting to be sorted - and he should get on with it.