Starmer is right to impose pylons and windfarms on NIMBY communities

Flip. It’s quite unusual for a Prime Minister to tell voters in such uncompromising terms they’re going to have to put up with things they don’t like.

You might even call it brave. The last election resulted in a big increase in marginal seats, vulnerable to being lost next time. A fifth of MPs have seats won by a margin of five per cent or less of votes cast. Nearly half of them are Labour.

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There are headaches in the making here for some of those Labour MPs. They’ll be the poor souls who have to do nervous, sweaty local radio interviews defending the building of a prison near a school (everything is near a school after all) or explain in restive public meetings why there has to be a large pylon on the edge of a view once immortalised by Wordsworth, Hardy or Grassic Gibbon. This prospect will not fill Labour backbenchers with a sense of wellbeing.

At least five current cabinet ministers, including Rachel Reeves, have in the past opposed housing developments in their own constituencies.

The UK Government is not responsible for setting planning policy in Scotland, but the local tensions caused by proposed developments like power lines, wind farms or housing estates, is one familiar to the Scottish Government. Here, too, ministers have come up against fierce resistance. It’s uncomfortable for any politician.

But the other side of this is that local campaigners who try to impede nationally important infrastructure plans do not impress the wider public much, especially when they lose all perspective and make unreasonable demands.

“Nimby” is a useful shorthand but not really a fair term. Of course people worry about the despoiling of their local environment; if local people didn’t care, then no one would.

If someone suggested building on Edinburgh beauty spots like Holyrood Park, Blackford Hill or the Pentlands Regional Park, I’d be feeling tragic about it too. Developers can be astonishingly insensitive to local people’s worries. Those concerns should shape the project design, but what can’t be permitted is for local protest campaigns to derail national projects of strategic significance.

'Brave, Prime Minister, very brave': Derek Fowlds, Sir Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington in Yes, Minister (Image: PA)

Take housing. If a new housing scheme is proposed, there might be concerns about loss of green space, increased traffic, the capacity at the GP surgery and school, and impacts on local wildlife. Fair enough.

But those aren’t the only considerations. At the other end of the housing chain, waiting for a life-changing break, are families living in one-room bed and breakfast accommodation because there aren’t enough social homes. This week, we learned that homelessness in Scotland is at a 12-year high with more than 10,000 children in Scotland living in temporary accommodation.

Young people are spending a third of their incomes on rent and are saving for deposits so slowly they’ll be 40 before mortgage companies will take them seriously. Everyone from housing campaigners and academics to politicians agree that the underlying problem is a lack of housing supply.

This isn’t the only issue – a failure to build more social homes and fewer five-bed executive villas is a glaring issue too – but there is no escaping the fact that we can’t adequately house the population with the current level of housing stock.

So what can be done? The answer is design new developments to meet local needs. Stringent conditions should be attached to new projects; if developers don’t like it, tough.

Improve the roads for everyone locally. Build a new GP surgery or expand the existing one. Build around the wildlife, making it a condition on the builders to install sizeable nature-friendly green spaces.

As the Wildlife Trusts put it: “A good, nature-friendly development retains existing meadows, wetlands, hedgerows, trees and woods, and joins them up with wildlife-rich gardens, verges, amenity green space, cycle paths and walkways.”

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Don’t build on key wildlife sites, or in parks or wild places that are prized for outdoor leisure. Don’t do anything rash like backing a presumption in favour of building on green belt that could be disastrous for some communities. Don’t build on flood plains.

Amend, redesign by all means, but houses, power lines and prisons do have to be delivered. Otherwise we fail to move forward, and the problems of homelessness, high rents and house prices, early prisoner releases and expensive power just get worse.

Besides, change is often less upsetting than people imagine. Planned pylons are sometimes likened to skyscrapers in the landscape, but that’s an exaggeration. They’re not solid objects. If you think of views that you know well, could you say where all the pylons are in them? I know I couldn’t.

Involving local people early on in shaping plans is the best way to avoid long, acrimonious disputes. There will always be individuals who oppose any development on principle, but most local campaigners want to engage. They should be listened to and worked with, then everyone emerges from the process feeling better. How can the local ecosystem be best protected? How can the impact on views be minimised? How can local services be enhanced? A power line might be rerouted or a new wetland created. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

And the prize is worth it, bringing on stream all that clean northern renewable electricity and building new homes in harmony with wildlife. Most of us would prefer not to have this stuff in our backyard, but the answer can’t always be to do it somewhere else.

Rebecca McQuillan is a freelance journalist specialising in politics and Scottish affairs. She can be found on X at @BecMcQ