Wearying process that can eat up your time – and your money

Published on Sunday 28 June 2009 21:59

THIS year, I spent my two-week summer holiday at the Holiday Inn next to Edinburgh Zoo – despite living in the capital's Dalry Colonies, near Haymarket.

I was there because, for the past two and a half years, I have been heavily involved in the Haymarket planning saga.

The Holiday Inn was hosting a public inquiry, but the residents' association very much felt like Cinderella going to the ball without the aid of a fairy godmother.

Those of us who opposed the development but who couldn't afford a planning consultant or legal counsel had to spend a lot of money and time preparing for the inquiry in Edinburgh's Central Library, reading and photocopying. Electronic copies were not available to us, unfortunately.

At the Holiday Inn, we watched sandwiches (paid for on expenses) being delivered to the main parties, while we sneaked in our own (highly illegal) sandwiches to avoid the expensive hotel lunches and brought in our own drinks.

To add insult to injury, we also had to pay to print and post copies of the evidence we submitted to the inquiry (e-mail was not sufficient) and we did not have any administrators to do it for us or any company-supplied photocopiers to use.

We are now an organisation even more financially challenged than before as a result of this development, and I almost had to resort to begging at our AGM in April for residents' donations to keep us sufficiently afloat to allow us to continue to print newsletters.

If you ever get involved in one of these planning sagas yourself, then I hope you are rich and well-connected.

It would have been easy to be beaten down by what turned out to be a two-and-a-half- year-long, drawn-out process, but you do have to wonder whether that is what developers of sites such as this rely on: members of the public falling by the wayside because they assume that the system is against them and that they don't have the time (or money!) to be or stay involved.

&#149 Maria Kelly is chairwoman of the Dalry Colonies Residents' Association.