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Wild Land News no 69, Summer 2007

Beauly-Denny Transmission Line

Article

That Inquiry - the stifling of dissent?

The Beauly-Denny Inquiry has just closed here in Perth as I write in early May. The strategic stage that is, because the three local sessions will trundle on till the end of the year, but anyone turning up to object to the line will be told they're too late, it is only about local adjustments from now on.

As well as giving evidence for the Beauly-Denny Landscape Group (the consortium of six national campaigning bodies), I attended for some days to hear the developer's landscape witnesses and others. Chastened, disheartened, and disillusioned, I have to conclude that our costly Public Inquiry system is neither open to the public nor designed to get to the heart of the matter. And this is despite it having so recently been revamped by Holyrood to make it more accessible and 'transparent'.

In a previous life, I took part in several mega Inquiries, where the forces pro et contra were evenly matched, and whatever the outcome, at least everyone had their say and all the relevant facts were brought out.

Here at Perth, I knew we would be David -v- Goliath, but I didn't expect our catapult to be confiscated as well. We couldn't afford a QC, and everyone knew we wouldn't be able to afford to mount legal challenges if mistreated, so that at every turn we have been made to feel like annoying bit-part onlookers, with the real business being between the Developers and the Official Objectors (Councils and SNH). The three Reporters [=Inspectors in England] deferred time and again to the arguments of their QCs, while swatting our solicitor away. They had a Technical Assessor for the Developer's witnesses, but it wasn't deemed necessary for him to assess our expert witnesses.

At one point, our witness Prof Andrew Bain was dissecting the economic justification for the line, and the QC objected that he was introducing new material not contained in his 'precognition' - the written evidence we had all had to submit in January. The Reporters stopped him, and made a great hoo-ha of striking out a great swathe of their notes. It really felt like being at a show trial in the soviet era - Joseph Heller would have been proud - "you have just given us the proof of your innocence, but because you didn't provide it to us before the trial began we haven't heard you say it, even though you could only possibly have obtained it after the prosecution produced their evidence." We can only conclude that the aim is to ensure that the Ministers - whoever they turn out to be - only have to comprehend one version of the economics when they take their decision.

Kafka would have been even prouder of this one. Highland Council were there as Objectors like us. But in fact they were only objecting to short bits of the line which they wanted undergrounded - they had declared their support for the principle of the line. In chatting to Highland planners beforehand, I had asked what their attitude would be to an alternative route, either overland via Aberdeen or better still, subsea. They readily agreed that these would be much better options, much less damaging to the landscape. So why hadn't they been exploring them, or even joining us in advocating them? We are only there to consider proposals that are put before us, they said. When their turn on the stand came, our lawyer sought to cross-examine them, and to his and my amazement was stopped by the Reporters. Why ? Because they are objectors and you are objectors so you are both on the same side of the table and we don't allow 'friendly' questioning.

When my own turn came, our lawyer tried to ask me about my experience in contesting unwelcome proposals such as quarries, where I had explored both the need for the product and alternative sources. The Councils' QC jumped in with 'don't answer that question' and insisted this was impugning the professionality of her clients. The Reporters upheld the objection, clearly not wanting to hear any more about alternatives, when their remit was quite obviously to deal only with the proposal on the table as expeditiously as possible.

Most galling of all was the time pressure - on us. The Developer's QC had several weeks to lead her numerous witnesses, with one or often two of them covering minute sub-divisions of specialisms. She often led them through their precognitions for an hour or more. The Councils and SNH had a whole week, even though they were only addressing limited aspects of amenity. We were allocated a couple of days. We were the only major in-principle objectors (Highlands before Pylons put up a brave show, but with amateur witnesses from the Ullapool area they were not directly relevant to this project), and we had already helped the Reporters by combining into one body to minimise duplication. At every step our lawyer was subjected to quite unwarranted pressure not to cross-examine at any length and certainly not to lead his witnesses on their precognitions, which were to be taken strictly as read and no additional material introduced. When finally he countered that he was merely seeking to lead us in the way that the Developer's QC had led hers, the Reporters simply prevaricated. Thus of perhaps fifty points I had prepared to make as reasonable and helpful expansions of my evidence, based on normal practice at past inquiries, I was able to smuggle in perhaps a dozen, at random, on the pretext that they were in some way responding to points made by earlier witnesses. Thus it was that the principal landscape arguments against the line and the endless slicing away at our heritage were over within an afternoon, finished before five and home for tea early.

Most Pyrrhic moment

Saving grace #1

"The landscape loss inflicted by the construction of the B-D transconnector, and the windfarms it would enable, would be severe and irreversible. The transconnector would abolish qualities that are - in the correct sense of that much mis-used word - unique. In cost-benefit terms, approving the transconnector would be a poor decision, for the gains made would be far outweighed by the economic and cultural losses to the Highland region. But in terms of those other, less quantifiable forms of landscape value - spiritual, cultural, ecological, aesthetic - it would be catastrophic. "Wild country is a thing of very high value", wrote the Scottish explorer-philosopher WH Murray in 1965, "It is a value that has been greatly underestimated by all but a very few of our planners... The remnants of wild Scotland will become a priceless asset, if we resolve now to keep them"."

Saving grace #2

Beauly-Denny will almost certainly go ahead unless governments and regulators wake up to the false economics. What we have to learn from it is that individual projects will keep on wriggling through until we wake the nation up to the idea of the Highlands as a whole still be a national treasure just about intact enough to be worth looking after, as our most precious and special long-term asset.

*Robert MacFarlane's book "The Wild Places" is due to be published this September

The Public Inquiry was attended on our behalf by David Jarman as a member of the Beauly-Denny Landscape Group. The above article is based on his impressions of the proceedings.