OFTEN at the council, we hear from officers about how East Lothian is a quick-growing county, a growth area in Scotland and anyone that has witnessed the rapid rate houses are going up in Haddington, Musselburgh, Longniddry or a host of other places in the county would find that hard to disagree with.

This building is often being done by the large national developers, companies with profits in the millions made in part from East Lothian. I know a significant feeling in East Lothian is that for the most part these companies don’t actually contribute much to life in East Lothian, I get that loud and clear regularly from my inbox – that these developers come in to plop housing down, don’t use local businesses or labour, cause major disruption, don’t pay any business taxes here and leave with a more-than-tidy profit.

Alongside those costs is also the additional cost to the taxpayer via the administration of the planning system because the planning of these new developments is significant.

A lot of work is done by the council’s planning department by providing what is called pre-application consultation, basically advice on an application and how it sits within local planning policy. This takes officers’ time and attention away from other matters and costs the council – thus you, the taxpayer – money.

Now this is a non-statutory service the council provides so it could simply stop doing it but it is widely recognised that pre-application planning advice can be a valuable step within the development process.

But rather than stop it completely, what I want East Lothian Council to do is charge for this advice for major applications and, come the budget early next year, that is what the Conservative councillors plan to propose.

To be clear, what I mean by major application is not planning applications to change windows or add an extension to a property or anything like that, but for applications for the larger housing developments that are fundamentally changing the places we call home. To give you an idea of the numbers we are talking about, in the year 2019-2020, of the 761 planning applications determined, 749 were smaller developments and only 12 were major developments.

Other councils have already taken this step, including most recently Glasgow. The fee structures vary widely but for example in Edinburgh, the cost for the service on a major or national development is £4,900 but we provide it free. Even the £4,900 amount I personally think is on the low side given the value of the advice and that it can help unlock millions in profit for the developers.

What this would mean is that East Lothian Council would have more money coming in to help cover the cost of providing the planning system and mean that more can be diverted to protecting frontline services.

Finally, I hope everyone had a great Christmas and I wish everyone a happy new year.