This planning gridlock is putting Scotland on hold

When I recount this story, it provokes one of two reactions. The most common is the trump card: "You think you had a problem? Wait till you hear my story ..."

The second is more worrying. It is a wearisome, cynical resignation: "It’s the system. It’s mad. But you can’t change it."

Certainly, many others have had far worse experiences with the planning process. When I wrote on this issue some three months ago, I received a flood of e-mails and letters testifying to horrific delays. Thanks to a good architect, I had a successful result over what now appears to have been a reasonable, even speedy procedure.

However, on the second response, I do detect a strong and growing revolt over Scotland’s planning system. It’s not led by home-owners with their insane, anti-social urge to improve their properties. This revolt is boiling up within a business community that has reached breaking point. And it is targeting what is now widely perceived to be an outdated, bureaucratic and outrageously inefficient system that is costing the country dear.

One of its chief victims is the Scottish Executive itself. Ambitious projects approved years ago are little further forward because of the interminable time it takes to get proposals through a planning process that is itself subject to innumerable changes and delays.

This process is a major contributor to Scotland’s lagging investment and economic performance. All sectors are affected - new housing, factory extensions, small business expansion, retail development and road and rail improvements. All are caught up in a worsening gridlock of delays and confusion.

In Scotland, we lack for nothing in aspiration. We want the economy to move forward. And we rightly want to retain the best of our environment and heritage. But the planning system seems to cut down every scheme for uplift and improvement to a draining and dispiriting crawl. It does so through the interplay of two powerful forces: the rapacious determination of the government sector to control everything that happens in Scotland, and a creaking planning process that is just not up to the job.

In this confluence, the system is no longer able to distinguish between those proposals that are genuine environmental or social threats that need to be modified, and those - the vast majority - that are well thought out, sensitive and sensible applications for redevelopment.

Everything is caught in the bureaucratic mill, from corporate headquarters to kitchen conservatories and loft extensions. Little wonder that as a country we are now saddled with a system that has come to substitute planning for building, bureaucracy for investment and process for real achievement.

Across the business world there are many who believe it is the planning system, rather than business rates, that is now imposing the bigger cost, and the bigger disincentive to new investment. And it is a cost now being borne by us all.

According to a biting report from CBI Scotland out today, the planning "system" could now be costing the Scottish economy around 600 million a year through delayed investment, lost turnover and higher costs of housing.

That, of course, has to be an arbitrary figure. But it is, I suspect, a conservative one. For there is barely a business in Scotland today that has not been affected by the system.

The vast majority of businesses recognise the importance of social and environmental factors in projects they undertake. But this is not the point at issue. What causes the despair - and ratchets up the disincentive to invest - is an antiquated, complex and hugely inefficient process through which all applications must pass.

According to the "system", no planning application should take more than eight weeks to complete. But, according to Gerry More, a senior executive of Cala Homes and one of the authors of the CBI report, most businesses now expect planning applications of any size to take two years to process. Margaret Curran, the planning minister, wrote in response to my earlier article that there were now "fast track" procedures. They are not much in evidence.

Even two years would be a luxury for some. The report highlights real-life case studies which illustrate the appalling state we are now in. Imagine, for example, a company planning a development to the south of Glasgow. The 1995 Strathclyde Structure Plan identified greenfield allocations for new private housing. No objections were lodged by the relevant district council, and in 1996 a local draft plan was published under which land would be released over the next ten years. Green for go? Not at all.

Due to local government reform, a draft local plan was not published for the area until 1999. The site was chosen as one of two preferred options for development in the final plan published last year.

A local plan inquiry had to be held. This was expected this year. But there not enough reporter-adjudicators. And the council had only recently completed its "needs assessment".

So the inquiry will not start until spring next year at the earliest, with adoption of the local plan waiting until the second half of 2005. "Such delays," says the CBI, "are exacerbated by the unwillingness of councils to allow planning applications in advance of local plans being finalised. It is also worth noting that by 2005 the extant local plan will be 18 years old, and of negligible value for planning purposes."

In short, it will not be possible to progress a planning application on a site identified for release in 1995 until 2005. There will also be a further delay that could mean not one single house being delivered within a 12-year period from when it first appeared in a draft structure plan.

With this process replicated to varying degrees across the country, it is not hard to see the impact on the cost of housing through the squeeze on released land.

This was a major theme of a perspicacious article by the economist Professor Sir Donald Mackay in The Scotsman last month. I am also indebted to him for correcting me on a recommendation I made that we should hire more planners to ease the strain. This, he rightly points out, would only make matters worse.

We cite further evidence of the cost problem in the business section today from the housebuilder Stewart Milne. Ten years ago, land would account for between 7.5 per cent and 12.5 per cent of the value of a new house. Nowadays, it could be anything between 25 per cent and 50 per cent.

It’s hard not to disagree with Stewart Milne’s blunt conclusion: "It’s crazy when you end up in situations where people are buying properties where 50 per cent of the value is going towards the land. The one thing we’ve got in Scotland is an abundance of land for the size of the population we’ve got."

I suspect the CBI report will be one of several warning flags to the Executive in coming months. As for my own flag at Inverogle, I’m not sure on completion whether to fly the Saltire or the People’s Republic of Romania.

I should add, in case my architect has a fit reading this, I’m only joking. The flagpole hasn’t got planning permission.