Make MSPs take the decison! Or give us binding referenda.

The most destructive planning phenomena we now face in Scotland is the resort to appeals when an elected council rejects a wind farm application.

Some Reporters may uphold the refusals decided democratically but that is not always the case. Communities face division and destruction of amenity as a result.

MSPs who have signed up the Scottish Parliament's pro wind policies and diktats, and whose parties all back subsidies and DECC line to the hilt, sit smugly away from the realities. I have yet to see or hear of my local MSP, for example, going to a community council meeting discussing wind issues, to see the effect of these policies on the community's constituents.

Whilst UKIP policy is that planning appeals would not be taken "out of county" by unelected officers but be decided by binding local referenda amongst the concerned communities/planning area, such trust of the electorate is an anathema to the other parties. It won't happen until UKIP has sufficient elected power in Westminster and Holyrood - on a par with our now being the second largest British party in the European Parliament.

Meantime, why do we have MSPs? Is it their role to sit smugly and aloof in Holyrood, and not carry the buck for what the laws they passed?

I say make them all, sitting in committee of the whole house, decide all wind farm appeals, with their votes recorded, so that we may know them for what they earn.

Mike Scott-Hayward
Chairman UKIP Scotland

Affodable Homes - Right to Buy not a barrier

Shelter Scotland are urging the Scottish Executive to abolish the right to buy.
The reasons are ostensibly understandable - there is a shortage of affordable homes to rent. Their thinking, however, is flawed: retaining a sitting tenant (by preventing them from buying) does not create a new home or shorten the waiting list.

Allowing a council house to be bought, does not make it disappear from overall stock. The occupants who, up to the time of purchasing, are council tenants, become home owner occupiers; owners indeed, of a house bought affordably. The Right to Buy is truly an affordable home purchase scheme. Well done Mrs Thatcher.

Some reforms are necessary. For example, all revenues raised should have to be used to support further access to affordable homes. The best way, I believe, would be to turn the revenue into grants to those on the waiting lists, towards deposits for new homes - in other words, used to subsidise purchase, making purchase more affordable. A variety of ways could be devised. 

Let's stop knocking a policy that has achieved a high home ownership ratio - an advance from the time when Scotland had fewer home owners proportionately than then communist East Germany.