Peter Wilson’s Wrap

And speaking of things Haymarket, Edinburgh’s planners – revealed at the Inquiry to be total chumps – have decided to bluff things out by providing a report to the Council on the city’s new local plan that dismisses UNESCO’s calls for a ‘buffer zone’ around the city’s Old and New Town World Heritage Sites. Regular Wrap readers will recall that it was only in June of this year that UNESCO threatened to remove the capital’s World heritage status if it didn’t strictly control development on the fringes of the sites in order to protect key views and for the Haymarket plans to be scaled back. The latter is dependent upon the outcome of the Inquiry but the planners have stepped boldly forward on the former issue by stating, “it is unclear what is meant by the concept of a buffer zone.”

Now just because they don’t understand it doesn’t mean our planning heroes don’t feel inclined to define it, for they go on to state that “the Council contends that for a built-up area like Edinburgh a buffer zone could not easily rest on clear and undisputable boundaries, noting that there are crucial viewpoints throughout the city towards landmarks within the Edinburgh WHS. As with the WHS itself, a buffer zone should only be delineated if it is necessary to show where a particular policy will be applied – no such policy has been suggested and so the appropriateness of a buffer zone is not accepted by the Council.”

So there you have it: a line or circle can be drawn to protect things inside of it just so long as the things on the outside of it which might impact upon the things within it are covered by a policy on what they can and can’t do. But because there isn’t such a policy – and they don’t intend to have one unless UNESCO force it upon them (and it has no statutory authority to do so, being only advisory) – they don’t see how they can be expected to protect views and buildings inside the line from the impact of crass developments outside the line on land that the Council once owned but sold and gave planning permission for in order to generate some dosh for a heavily over-priced and extremely limited tram system that nobody asked for.

OK, I may not have tried to match their definition of a buffer zone but I feel entirely confident that the above paragraph fairly accurately encapsulates the current direction of Edinburgh’s planning system. Thank goodness it’s only a very small city that the muddled munchkins of Market Street have to deal with.