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SNP Government spends £18 million on local planning appeals

The SNP Government has spent nearly £18 million handling appeals on council planning decisions since 2017, according to a Freedom of Information response obtained by the Scottish Conservatives.

During that period, ministers overturned 389 decisions out of 837 – 46 per cent – in defiance of the local authorities’ verdicts.

Shadow Local Government Secretary Miles Briggs has accused SNP ministers of “arrogantly overruling local decisions” and of wasting taxpayers’ money to ride roughshod over council rulings.

He is also bringing forward a Local Government Powers and Protection Bill to ensure councils are protected against SNP centralisation and finally receive a fair funding deal after years of “savage” SNP cuts.

Scottish Conservative Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Local Government, Miles Briggs MSP, said: “This is not just clear evidence of an SNP power grab on our local authorities, but of precious public money being squandered needlessly.

“It is unacceptable that more than half of decisions made by local authorities in the last year were then overturned by the Scottish Government, and that taxpayers are having to foot the bill for their authoritarian and centralising instincts.

“The SNP is ignoring the views of local communities by arrogantly overruling decisions made by councils. Out-of-touch ministers in Edinburgh clearly think that they are better equipped to make these decisions than those who live and work in the local communities affected.

  

“Not content with stripping powers away from local councils and making savage cuts to their budgets, the SNP is now overruling them on the things they still control. And they’ve wasted millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to frustrate and reverse democratic decisions made at a local level.”

Notes:

 

Since 2017, the SNP Government has spent almost £18 million ruling on local authority planning decisions. Figures obtained by the Scottish Conservatives indicate that the DPEA (Planning and Environmental Appeals Division) has spent a total of £17.7 million, between 2017-18 and 2021-22, on all the works it has carried out. (FOI available upon request).

Since 2017, the SNP Government has overruled 46% of all planning decisions from local authorities. The SNP Government has overturned 389 local authority decisions out of 837 decided appeals between the fiscal years 2017-18 and 2021-22. In 2021-22 alone, it overturned 96 decisions (55%) (FOI available upon request).

Miles Briggs MSP has proposed a bill to protect local planning decisions. The legislation proposed by Scottish Conservative MSP Miles Briggs aims to prevent the Scottish Government from overturning planning decisions made by local authorities. This comes as a response almost half local authority decisions being overturned last year. (The Planner, 28 July 2022, link).