Exemplary victory for the Ardentinny vuvuzelas as National Park Board backs down

The residents of Ardentinny have just showed what determined, persistent and resourceful community action can achieve. In a David and Goliath conflict, the little Cowal village on the west shore of Loch Long has seen off an attempt by the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park to put a development of 36 houses there into the new Local Plan.

This issue has been running since early in 2009 and at its meeting on 23rd June 2010, the Park’s Board accepted the recommendation of the Park Authority to remove its Ardentinny housing project from the Local Plan.

The Board also recommended adjusting the settlement boundary to follow the A880, meaning that the proposed settlement are lies outside the boundary. A question from Board Member, Russell Bruce, well known in Cowal through Cowalfest, clarified the import of this additional change. The boundary is being moved to remove the ‘predisposition’ to site development in this location.

The vuvuzela effect of the 17 month long Ardentinny campaign – with packed consultation meetings, forensic questioning, objections, a petition and constant lobbying – has clearly given the National Park Board and the planning authority such a headache that they never want to run up against them again.

The community had every possible obstruction thrown at them – including a threat that its publication of the relevant section of the Local Plan map could contravene Ordnance Survey copyright. The excellent Ardentinny website promptly replaced the map with a developed Google Map showing the size and location of the proposed development site. This was accompanied by an exhaustive gallery of photographs demonstrating how invasive the proposed development would be.

The community used its website as it should be used – to provide commonly accessible and regularly updated information and to enable online debate on the issue.

In January this year a community delegation – drawn from Ardentinny Community Council and the Proposed Housing Development Working Group – visited the National Park HQ in Balloch for a consultation, prior to another public consultation session in Ardentinny’s Village Hall.

This was a campaign that never let up and never lost concentration. The outcome is a comprehensive victory for Ardentinny and its supporters – and for democracy. It demonstrates what can be achieved against huge odds by resolute, resourceful and intelligent community action.

It does raise an issue though, which, as they say about football, is a game of two halves – and whether or not this issue had any role in the Ardentinny resistance.

The social housing issue

This is one of the trickiest issues to confront, for communities and for the media as well as for planners. It is easy to be variously accused of Nimbyism, a classist attitude, inhumanity, a Stalinist communism, insensitivity to community nature and needs and being a wrecking ball.

Sometimes some of these accusations are true, on both sides of the issue.

Positive and constructive change requires movement on all sides:

• to air and share perspectives objectively and to work to find a balance between very real social need and the functional and aesthetic integrity of existing communities;
• to offer less automatic  resistance to change itself – the simple fact is that, as with living species, communities that do not change become unsustainable;
• to look objectively at the positives and negatives for both partners in the experience available in small rural communities to those in need of social housing;
• to establish and actively use good and collaborative change management approaches.

There is, of course, plenty of room for improvement in planning consent procedures but there is already significant change for the better in the requirement for community involvement in the process.

While this can be seen – and, as necessary, used – to arm a blocking campaign, it needs also to be seen and used positively in a collaborative management of change.