Nairn Matters

Thanks to nairnbairn for this contribution.

“Winning battles, but losing the war: is Nairn doomed to disappear?”

Almost all residents of Nairn, whether born and bred here or more recently-arrived, believe rightly that Nairn has a unique identity and a number of attractive features – many of which are at risk through neglect or bad planning. There is wide consensus on the desirability of a bypass, for example, and on the need to deal with the problem of the “Somerfield site”. And when specific proposals surface, like Sainsburys, or Sandown, local opinion can be mobilised (though there are inevitably different views on what is, or is not, needed).

It is of course vital to look carefully at each and every development application, and to argue for local improvements. But if that is all we do, we risk winning occasional battles but losing the war.

The real risk is that, while we worry about specific proposals that may come forward for Nairn itself, wider structural and administrative reforms will in effect legislate Nairn out of existence. Governments pay lip-service to devolution, decentralisation, democracy and consulting communities. But the tendency of all governments, and the practical evidence in our region, is of a constant process of centralisation and amalgamation. Some examples illustrate the trend:

- Highland Council. It is a recurrent Nairn complaint that the Highland Council’s approach is ‘Inverness-centric’. Dingwall, Wick, and Thurso probably say the same. Local evidence is clear: closure of the local court and relocation of the planning office are just two recent such decisions.

- the “A96 Corridor masterplan”. Despite serious doubts as to its status and legitimacy as a basis for planning, the fact is that this scheme envisages massive urban growth and sprawl extending virtually continuously from Inverness to Nairn. It makes gestures to green-ness, but this concept embodies all the worst features of discredited 1960s urban planning, threatens some of the best agricultural land and established rural communities in the area, and regards Nairn simply as the eastern end of a Greater Inverness conurbation with no functions and identity other than as another suburb in the commuter-zone. Yet this masterplan was subject to very little public consultation and scrutiny. It needs to be persistently challenged.

- the Inner Moray Firth Plan. Now being drafted as part of the new Highland-wide Development Plan, this will in effect become the new Local Plan which determines what will, or will not happen, in Nairn. There will be no new Local Plan for Nairn as such. So the danger is that the new Inner Moray Firth Plan will visualise an Inner Moray Firth urban zone, and will further reinforce the existing tendency for development priorities to be set in response to the aspirations and forecast needs of the city of Inverness. The particular, and different, interests of Nairn… or Cromarty… or Beauly… risk being ignored or submerged.

- the Boundary Commission. We have parliamentary constituencies for Scottish (Holyrood), British (Westminster) and European (Strasbourg) Parliaments. Already Nairn is lumped together with bits of Inverness, with Lochaber, and with Badenoch, and in a Highland-wide EU constituency. This is driven largely by population-formulae. But there is an exercise currently uner way to re-draw the Scottish consituency boundaries. At present Nairn is linked with part of Inverness, and Lochaber – which is weird enough, but at least obliges the elected representative to balance a diverse range of constituency concerns . The new proposal is for there to be a constituency of “Inverness and Nairn”. No prizes for guessing whose views, and votes, and interests, will dominate the behaviour of the MSP for that constituency!

So what can be done to protect and defend the interests – indeed the survival – of Nairn over the next couple of decades? Yes, continue to look critically and thoughtfully at all proposals to ‘develop’ the town. But also, make your voices heard as these administrative and political reforms are taken forward. Write or talk to your Community Council(s) and elected Councillors. Join groups like Action for Planning Transparency (APT) and VisitNairn. Lobby the Association of Nairn Businesses. National and local governments are obliged to hold formal consultations. If we want the plans to reflect what we, the local residents want, we have to feed in views, individually and collectively, before the plans are actually agreed. You can bet that developers, landowners and others will be doing exactly that!

So for starters, details of the Highland Council’s Development Plan Scheme can be found here

http://www.highland.gov.uk/yourenvironment/planning/developmentplans/developmentplanscheme.htm

and there will be two rounds of public consultations in August and November of this year. So look at what is proposed, think what it might mean for Nairn, and send in comments!

The Inner Moray Firth Plan will be the first of the “local” plans to be drafted once the Highland-wide plan is in place – so probably in early 2010?

And for the Boundary Commission’s redrawing of the political constituencies, look here

http://www.bcomm-scotland.gov.uk/1st_holyrood/rev_rec_const/index.htm

Feedback on those proposals is invited by 21 June 2009. So if you don’t want Nairn to be swallowed up into an Inverness constituency for Holyrood, send in feedback (there’s a form on that website) soon!

Concluding thought: surely it wasn’t a Nairn resident who said, “I used to be apathetic… but now I can’t be bothered.”

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