The next step towards our new Local Development Plan has now finished, with a series of public workshops run around the county.

These were generally well attended and well run by the team of local planning officers.

The next stage allows the public to make its responses to the Main Issues Report by February 8 2015.

I hope they take the opportunity to express their views.

So, what did we learn through this new more transparent planning process?

- That with a fair wind the new Local Development Plan may be signed off in 2017, just in time for the South East of Scotland Plan on which it has to be based being superseded by its new version in 2018.

- That much of the key infrastructure needed for any plan will be stressed to breaking point or beyond by 33 per cent population growth and isn’t within the control of the council anyway. It could put traffic lights at the Bankton roundabout, though.

- That the proposals will involve giving up parts of the green belt, but villages will be protected by introducing a new type of green belt, for example, protecting Muirfield golf course from being converted to housing.

- That logic makes it obvious that the preferred compact strategy that would focus new housing and economic development towards the west would deal best with the severe constraints, but at a price.

- That developers are looking to a massive Drem expansion, ‘Dre(a)m city’, as the radical new solution to solving the problem of where to build new houses in North Berwick.

Never mind that it sits bang on the prime coastal plain that supports our supposed key agriculture and tourism industries, has numerous environmental and infrastructure defects and will just flood an overwhelmed North Berwick with inhabitants trying to escape it.

That is the problem with transparency – you can see right through it.

Martin White Craighead Cottage West Fenton