DESPITE the fact that East Lothian Council’s Local Development Plan allocating 6,000 more new homes is barely two years old and to be built between 2022 and 2032, developers are circling like wolves.

In the hope of even larger profits, they are pressuring both council and Government to double this number to 12,000. At their meeting last week, the council voted to resist this.

But a precedent was set a decade ago. At a similar meeting, the council resolved to hold the number of new homes built for 2010-2022 to 5,000. The Scottish Government simply overruled them, doubling the number to 10,500.

Town planning in East Lothian is non-existent. Before officials come after me with pitchforks, let me say it is scarcely their fault. Scotland has no real city region planning beyond licensing developers. There are few laws to force coherent development, not just houses. National Planning Framework 4 is a box-ticking exercise in waffle that hangs numbers of new homes around each council’s neck. There is scant integrated transport, co-ordinated health/social care, or business integration to reduce travel to work. The will to create compact, liveable towns like Munich or San Francisco – let alone iconic and memorable like Edinburgh’s New Town – does not exist.

Homes here were already expensive before Covid sent city flat-dwellers scrambling for gardens and countryside – a gold rush for developers here. Even before that, clusters of homogeneous, middle-class housing were glued on as suburbs to our existing towns. Other than school extensions, roads, doctors’ surgeries, business centres and other vital infrastructure were skimped. This can only be skimped so long before you create disjointed urban jungles, plagued by traffic.

To accommodate 12,000 more, all towns will again swell with tacked-on suburbs. But lack of planning foresight means suburbs already built block sensible options to integrate them sensibly. All our towns are in the same pickle:

l Dunbar: The railway cuts the new houses off from High Street. Spott Road floods and there is no alternative, so they shop at Asda.

l Haddington: Crossing the town requires passing through Hardgate lights. Letham Mains has blocked any southern bypass from there to the Gifford Road.

l Musselburgh: Crossing the town requires passing the Caprice restaurant. Neither Inveresk Road nor the Electricity Bridge have been prepared as relief routes.

l North Berwick: The 500 new homes must pass both schools to shop or commute. A long-proposed relief road from Dirleton Road is now blocked by Ferrygate.

l Tranent: Getting from Birsley Brae to Ormiston Road requires going through the town. West Windygoul makes a southern bypass impossible.

Twenty years ago, safeguarding such options was feasible. Yet, instead of charging developers to safeguard, or even provide, such long-term essentials, ELC forfeited any chance of all of us – not just developers – benefitting from all this growth.