This is the type of thing that happens if I wake up ridiculously early – I’ve read the 164 pages, 593 paragraphs and four appendices of the Reporters’ report to Scottish Ministers which formed the basis of the rejection of planning permission for a golf course at Coul Links. And I attach the report below so that you can read it too – or click here.
There won’t be many people who read this report – mainly insomniacs, interested parties and nerds, I guess – but it is a wonderful thing. Maybe ‘rollicking good read’ oversells its entertainment value a little, just as the quotes on the fronts of many books do, but it is, or at least it seems to me to be, a very clear account of the cases for and against this development going ahead and the legal and policy considerations made in reaching a conclusion.
I’ll make a few comments below the file insert but do give the document a quick skim or a thorough read sometime – it’s educational.
NA-270-010 Reporters’ Report – 29 August 2025Download
This is the second attempt to gain planning permission for a golf course at this highly designated site (see previous blog from yesterday and the links to posts on this site going back over a decade) – I thought there had been more but those two have kept us busy over a decade. I predict there might well be further attempts, particularly as the developer doesn’t seem to have learned much from the first refusal.
I am grateful to Richard Wilson (a friend of this blog see a guest blog on the EU from over a decade ago, another in 2018 and a third in 2020; he also wrote ‘the’ book on Yorkshire arachnids) who posted about the Reporters’ report on LinkedIn yesterday.
Richard points out that para 336 includes this (my emphasis):
“As the reporters who considered the previous golf course application confirmed that they found the absence of more detailed invertebrate survey work [made] it difficult for them to assess the potential impact of the proposed golf course on the relevant species and their habitats, we are surprised that the applicant chose not to improve the standard of their desk-based invertebrate survey work, to update it or to supplement it with site-based invertebrate surveys.”
Surprising indeed! If a weakness of a previous application was, in my words, that it didn’t demonstrate that there would be a lack of impact on nature conservation interest because it didn’t collect data that could show that, then it is indeed surprising that a later application repeats that failure.
How much time of statutory sector staff, government staff, politicians both local and national and hard-pressed conservation charities has been used up in the process of fighting this proposal which is flawed, in my opinion in many respects, but quite blatantly in not taking any notice of why the previous application failed? Why have we all paid that economic price so that developers can roll the dice again? The complexity of planning systems (plural, as they are a bit different in different parts of the UK) is often criticised by developers (particularly ones who have lost!) but this works both ways. Of course, developers should be able to keep trying to gain planning permission at their own cost, but what of the cost to the rest of society from repeated applications? When would repeated applications at the same site for the same purpose failing for the same reasons be regarded as vexatious? And are there any penalties for such behaviour? Maybe future applicants who wish to create a golf course on this site would be interested in that too.
Why did Highland Council not turn this application down but instead went against NatureScot’s advice which meant that it ended up with ministers?
There are suggestions here that the site is deteriorating in habitat quality – what action is being taken to ensure that the site is in good condition? It’s harder to argue that a golf course will be damaging to Scotland’s wildlife if the wildlife is being lost without a golf course.
I wrote a few words about Coul Links in the chapter in Reflections (pp105-7) which dealt with conservation success stories. I’m glad that it is still a success story. This is the only known site in the world for Fonseca’s Seedfly after all. If I wanted to build a golf course here (I don’t) then I’d start trying to find that little fly all over the place to begin to undermine the importance of this site.