2006 Inner Mory Firth planning thinking inappropriate for 2013?

Alistair Noble of Suburban CC and an indefatigable campaigner on Nairn issues was the guest speaker at the Auldearn Community Council meeting on Wednesday night. He told the meeting:

"What we are trying to do as far as the recent Nairn decisions go is to get to a position where we are working much more, what we would call, in partnership with Highland Council under a framework that actually the locals have a say in the plan before it becomes a plan rather than having to react to something that appears to be in tablets of stone and we’re chasing our tails and objecting to it. 

This is the Inner Moray Firth Local Development Plan that we are now being consulted on but sitting behind that is the Highland wide Local Development Plan. Quite a lot of us have been arguing from the start that you can’t have a Highland wide Local Development Plan. You have either a new Highland strategic plan or a local plan. It’s a mixed up strategy and local ends up in the sort of muddle we are in.

Going back to the sort of thinking around 2006/2007 where the A96 corridor and the vision that Nairnshire would double its population. At that time they were projecting something like 175 houses per year for Nairn. We’ve actually built something like 75 houses per year for Nairn over that 13 years and the last 3 years we’ve built 24 houses per year in Nairn. So we have a 2006 vision that said roughly the 5,000 homes we have are going to have 10,000 houses and our population was going to go from roughly, it you take in Ardersier, 15,000 to roughly 20-30,000 depending on where you drew the line with Inverness. Between Nairn and Inverness there was going to be a continuous development; Sandown, Delnies, Whiteness, Tornagrain and then you hit Inverness East coming towards you.

I think where we are at now is probably worth just going over recent events and then trying to be as positive as we can. But I think what we need are solutions, it’s easy to criticise decisions from the post but the decisions were made at a time when people believed in, let’s say the Celtic Tiger, we were in this arc of prosperity. We were all going to have houses and it was boom time. That unfortunately has gone, it was a complete myth based on dubious banking practices and lending practices. That’s why we are trillions in debt. That is why Spain has got a million empty houses, Ireland has got hundreds of thousands of empty houses and America has got enormous financial problems. So in my opinion and the opinion of many others the sensible thing to say would be say, look that was the scene in 2006, we’re in 2013, the financial position is very different and also I think the community – this is the really positive thing, what we’ve got in Nairnshire is all the Community Councils working very closely together and being very willing to take part in that discussion where we try and work out what is in the best interests of our community before we get a plan rather than having a plan. "