After much pressuring from Friends of Craighouse, the council have finally had to release the Environmental Statement prepared for the Craighouse planning application. Last week they said all the documents were up but this key document was missing. It was not on the portal.

We have asked the Council repeatedly about this report. They have repeatedly said it was not being done.

Its  inclusion also means that we should have 28 days rather than 21 to put in objections. We have asked repeatedly about this also and the Council say 21 days because there is no Environmental Impact Assessment and no requirement for one.

This full report is required to be public by law. After pressure from us, they have released the non-technical summary of the EIA (also called the Environmental Statement). It should contain most of the real detail of the proposals and their impact on the environment and views across Edinburgh. Some of the information (especially in relation to views) is of extremely low quality, but we will come back to this in future posts.

These documents reveal the following:

• That the excessive new-build, far from being reduced, has increased, yet again, from 160,000sqft at the last set of exhibitions to 178,000sq ft. [Update 22nd November: the developers have since told us that the previous level of new-build was closer to 190,000-230,000sqft, so the current plans are a reduction, but only because they were very quiet about the massive quantity of new-build in their previous plans]
• That despite the Craighouse Partnership saying they have decided to save the orchard,  they intend to chop down all the apple trees.
• That The Craighouse Partnership intend to chop down most of the mature trees along the boundary with Craighouse Road and the line of mature trees next to the car-park (despite promises to the contrary in the meeting I attended)
• That bats are roosting in one of the buildings scheduled for demolition
• Protected species are contained in the old “consent site” they are claiming to have activated

These are public documents that should be made available BY LAW.

But we need to make people aware of what is going on and what the reality is for Craighouse.

Our “How To Object” letter will be available on the website from tomorrow. Thanks a lot for your patience.