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| Highfield track, Scone, will be bisected by the Cross Tay Link Road and the wood on the right felled, on councillors' orders. |
Lockdown last year was so peaceful in town. No traffic, birdsong, people walking and cycling. Afterwards, I turned away from the returning traffic, town, capitalism and exploitation to nature. But I found a multitude of paths condemned by a road planned to wreck 6km of countryside and destroy Highfield wood north of Scone which is also a place of refuge and recreation for local people. The road would include a bridge over the Tay. There was, eventually, an initial objection from Nature Scot about things like runoff from the road into Tay where salmon and lamprey were their particular stated concern. Opposition from the national nature organisations was for the most part non-existent, flimsy or, in the case of Nature Scot, withdrawn. Many of these organisations were funded by the government who was also partially funding the road. Pine marten had previously been spotted in the wood. I was told the ecologists who visited about these and the local bats were paid by the developers. The bats would move on they apparently said and they claimed the pine martens already had...
I tried to point out, not the conservation or climate arguments which would fall on the deaf ears of our councillors, but the fact that the road would increase traffic around town and not solve the traffic problem there anyway. After the hole in the council's finances caused by the pandemic, weren't there better ways of spending the money and not just on the obvious (but politically unpopular) ones of cycle lanes and park and choose, but on, say, rural broadband and the development of local economies?
A handful of councillors voted to pause and reconsider but about thirty-five others pressed on, tories SNP and Liberal Democrats alike, people more homogeneous than they were distinct. None of them as far as I could see had walked much or perhaps any of the countryside they planned to destroy. The regions's only Labour councillor took me up on my offer to show councillors the land and came for a walk, with his children and mine, through the woods including the children's den that will be all but destroyed by the proximity of the road.
Formal objections from the community about the road were relegated to a page in the council's document about the benefits of the road to councillors. There were only about fifty objections due to a combination of public apathy and lack of awareness of where the road was actually going to go. These things are deliberately never made very obvious on the ground. It is a dedicated member of the public who reads and understands every obscure council sign on a post, realises perhaps they might have the right of objection, and a) decides whether it's worth doing b) figures out what the process is. Everything is stacked against public engagement. So the fifty odd objections, mine included, were all ignored.
The Local Development Plan is a statutory document that is incredibly important in deciding local land use. Developers make decisions based on it and if councils veer from this document they can be and apparently are sued by developers. Most ordinary people nowadays don't expect to be involved in decisions about their local area and those who try are well used to being fobbed off, shut out, ignored. Most municipal decisions, whether about your local park, streets, services or about wider local land use are made with very little genuine public involvement. In Perth & Kinross any surveying of people about changes is often overturned by councillors eager to appease complainers, especially when these stir up local community discontent which might threaten re-election.
I could find no way to formally appeal the decision about the road after that. Eventually, I discovered that in planing law only the applicant can object to decisions about a planning application and anyway, the application had been successful. Who was the applicant, incidentally? Well, Perth council. And who judged the application? Perth council. Was there nothing wrong with this? The law lets us do it, said the council. The Green MP Mark Ruskell was the only politician of stature to get involved in any way but had not been effective. Really what was needed was for him to take up the issue of communities being steamrolled by a system that allowed the council to be both judge and jury on its own application. Actually what was needed was for him and others like him to get better protection for the countryside and to beef up laws on climate change. The UK government isn't ready for COP 26 never mind climate catastrophe. Boris Johnson's new economic model of "higher wages, better working conditions and a rise in productivity" is the same old capitalist mantra that has been destroying the planet for the last 250 years.
I put in an objection on behalf of a group about the speed limit of the new road and tried to get it reduced to 40mph from 50mph on the basis that it would have an "active travel route" alongside. It failed. I put in an application for the point where a local path through the soon to be felled Highfield Wood would be bi-sected by the road, to have a speed limit of 30mph. This too failed. The council said they might look at it again when houses and a school were built beside the road as if this had any bearing on the people using the path. The landscape was to be left with what I started to think of as "hanging paths" - paths left extant but with the countryside around them destroyed. But what matter if there were no longer any point to the paths, if they were no longer any good for enjoying a quiet walk, listening to birdsong, enjoying the views while being alert for wildlife? The huge planned road within sight and sound would make a mockery of the reasons why people come to walk in the countryside. But "The council has fulfilled its statutory responsibility..." of in this case maintaining the paths intact or diverted. The mindless cogs in a machine, continue to turn, blind, deaf, merely operating without care nor awareness and yet it is humans who issue these orders on the direction of bigger, similarly blind, deaf cogs whom we elect, who then tear up the countryside.
I walked other paths but found the same insistent focus on exploitation. I found a countryside trust, run by a businessman not there really to promote and improve access to the countryside, but to run projects to keep the lights on, pay salaries and further careers. These projects that were less about the stated aim of improving countryside access for walkers, more about implementing "active travel routes", stretches of tarmac - bike lanes in essence - through the countryside. These benefit cyclists no doubt, but not families out for inter-generational walks of grandparents parents, grandchildren, toddlers, dogs. The fact that people slower or hard of hearing are shocked by fast riding bikes is batted away with facile "care and share" type signs on path. That dogs or toddlers have to jump or be snatched out the way of bikes every two minutes, if indeed they manage, the implementers and funders care not a jot. It probably does not occur to them. Bike lanes, sorry, "active travel routes" is where the government money is and that's what counts.
In the case of Stanley and Luncarty this trust planned to open new countryside access between these two villages despite a core path already existing which was illegally blocked by agricultural fencing. The council has a statutory responsibility to clear the many such obstructions but had failed to do so for some twelve years. The whole thing was supported by a keen cyclist in one of the villages who ran the "community support" while he parked his work vehicle on pavements in town. Most people in the villages didn't even know about the unsignposted, blocked legal path so the wool was easily pulled over their eyes: give them a choice between new path A and new path B and don't tell them about the old, legitimate path. When questioned, the council came up with fudged, illogical excuses that boiled down to a planned development on the site of the path (there was no reason the path could not continue through the development) and the council simply being unwilling to tell the farmer to unblock it. He won't want to, they said...
Rather than make a united front of various groups to bid to reopen the legitimate path one man decided he was the one to handle this - on his own. To my knowledge, to date, he has not been successful.
Paths blocked by illegal, highly efficient fencing are fading from memory as the traces of them fade from the land and this is what the council counts on. They clearly do not care because so many remain closed. Occasionally a landowner takes it upon themselves to gate and fence very popular core paths as happened by Methven farm last year. The fury of local people, visible in their attempts to destroy the gates and fencing, meant that ultimately somebody used a power tool on one of these gates, reopening it for walkers.
At Bridge of Earn, the same charity bid and got government funding again from Sustrans for a path between Bridge of Earn and villages in Fife. The bike lane was to follow the route of an existing path across four fast motorway slip roads. I pointed out to the community, the designer, the trust and ultimately the funder, the danger of a cycle lane, which apparently a twelve-year-old was supposed to be able to use, across these slip roads without an automated crossing, speed bumps or any indication of who had priority. No-one really cared. There were contradictions and excuses and,
- "Well, there is an existing path there already"
- "Not one that's used. It comes to a dead-end then and means walking on a famously dangerous road where a cyclist has recently been killed by a driver.""
- Well, there will be a crossing eventually, when the new houses are built".
- "And when will that be?"
- "Erm, no date for the houses, yet"
Careers and money, projects and exploitation and nobody really thinking about the children and families, the actual people the path is supposed to be for.
There was another path at Luncarty that was due to be cut off by the new road over the Tay. Various groups, including mine, put in objections. The council said there was another road crossing nearby people could use, but this knocked out the circular route people liked to make. The council also said the crossing wasn't used much, something disputed by local people and plainly untrue on the two occasions I visited. The council would obviously like to close both crossings but one of them has a bus stop on both sides of the A9 used by people from Redgorton village. The council's solution for the route they plan to close? People should walk from the A9 where the path will end, up to the bus stop crossing, then walk back down to opposite where they were diverted from - a half kilometre diversion, which would negate the point of a circular anyway. "Crossing" in any case is a misnomer, implying some safe way of getting over the A9. No, you just take your life in your hand and cross four lanes of dual carriageway traffic travelling at 70mph, something I have never been brave enough to do, but people who live nearby do, often. The council, Scottish government and the developers are destroying so much but decided they could not find the money in a £120 million road and bridge over a river to put in a footbridge or, more accessible yet, an underpass under the A9 to protect peoples' lives. They will not even put steps up to the river bridge from a footpath below it, because that would cost money. People can be again diverted to walk along and up the road to the river crossing instead. They call this road an improvement for "non-motorised users".
It could not be plainer that pedestrians count for absolutely nothing.
None of any of these plans is ever couched in easy to understand language or clear diagrams. The diagrams are obscure, the terms are legalese and it is all hidden in abstruse corners of the council's website. Nor is the process of how to object and what then happens clear to almost any member of the interested public you speak to.
All these projects pay salaries and further careers at the expense of the preservation and improvement of the natural world and sustainable access to it for ordinary people.
The charity I mentioned is though embarking on an ambitious project of persuading landowners to embrace ecological land reform. There is funding available here too as people find ways to make money through the restoration of our ravaged land. The idea locally is to use Perthshire to connect the two national parks through a sustainable use of land. After years of watching endless consultations and workshopping in Perth and Kinross with practically no actual change I wonder how much of this latest project will be a funding bid to pay people to look into it and, in this ultra-conservative region that prefers a drive through Tim Hortons to sustainable horticulture, how much things will actually change on the ground.
There would seem to be a few ways to address the exploitation of local countryside for development in its various forms:
1) Politics, unfortunately, notably the election of sympathetic councillors. Note, previously sympathetic councillors have been "bought" by convenorships, or ideological deals, so actually, you need a councillor who is both sympathetic and staunch. The way the populace votes depends largely on their local values, level of education and age. Unless there is already "green" political will and a local culture as in Bristol, that is known to care for the environment over, say, vehicular convenience, you might as well forget this as a route for change.
2) You can try to get involved in the next local development plan. This is actually a form of 1). Good luck with that, even if you are part of a local community group. There are far more powerful monied interests who have already done deals behind the scenes before your community group even gets to the table.
3) Activist and anarchist type protests. The Tory government has been cracking down on protest in various forms throughout its term, notably in protests by the general population in Bristol and on Extinction Rebellions protests and their offshoots like Insulate Britain. It is now rushing through legislation to make forms of protest illegal. This is a brave but dangerous, probably unpleasant and likely ineffective route.
4) Buying land privately and protecting it whether as an individual or more effectively, as part of a community initiative. These are likely to protect very small tracts of land and require a huge amount of effort. You can also apply for council land that is not being otherwise used to be sold, leased or lent to you. In our area I think this is called "Community Asset Transfer". It is something that the Walled Garden for instance, at Murray Royal hospital is engaged in.
The fourth of these options seems to be the most effective way of proceeding.
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