The public accountability of our Public Authorities has, over the last twenty years, been reduced to a thread. Part of the reason for this is that journalists are, with a few honourable exceptions, no longer employed to report on what our Public Authorities are up to. The days of the media regularly reporting on Board…
Tag: Freedom of Information
Parkswatch previously published information about the amounts collected from Voluntary Donations at the Coire Cas car park between 2013 and 2017 (see here). HIE were asked to detail how that money had been spent and although they ‘did not have that information’’ they asserted ‘funds were committed to car park maintenance and other projects’ We…
[This post was corrected and updated in June 2024 after I identified a mistake about the price Scottish Enterprise had paid for the Riverside Site]. Last week I mentioned the growing media interest in the Flamingo Land proposals at Balloch and it was great to see this powerful piece from Kevin McKenna at the weekend. …
Knowledge and the abuse of power Globally, there is a struggle going on about who controls information and part of this is about who gets to see publicly funded research. George Monbiot has given excellent coverage to how academic research is being captured by corporate interests and what people are doing to oppose this (see…
This is the second, in a series of posts (see here), about HIE’s mismanagement of Cairn Gorm based on their latest response to my questions about the procurement process which led to CairnGorm Mountain Ltd being outsourced to “Natural Retreats”. In 2013 Highlands and Islands Enterprise excluded Cairngorms Snowsports, a sound local company with a…
In my view there is no justification for a Public Authority to commission research and then to keep this secret. That, however, has been what the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority has been doing for the last five years. Unlike the Cairngorms National Park, which has a Research Strategy and a dedicated website…
I’d like to apologise to readers for reporting that all four cases the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority reported to the Procurator Fiscal last year involved campervans. The LLTNPA is now claiming that none of the cases involve campervans and, if that is the case, it has implications both for my post yesterday…
The posts on parkswatch last week by Graham Garfoot (see here) and Alan Brattey (see here) coincided with the excellent coverage from the BBC about Highland and Islands Enterprise’s disastrous management of Cairn Gorm. This appeared on both radio and TV and while I had been interviewed for the story a few weeks ago I…
Following my post on 28/2/2019 about the ADAC Structure and COWI reports on the funicular (see here), this post shows how Highlands and Islands Enterprise are deliberately trying to cover up and hide information about what has gone wrong with the Funicular on Cairngorm. I sent an FOI request on 03/10/2018 for two other reports…
The papers for the next Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority Board meeting on Monday 18th March were published last week (see here). There are some good things in them, particularly the papers on “Wild Park” and a new Forest Strategy (see here), which I will consider further in due course. There are also…
Following the failure of the Funicular Railway and the predictably adverse impact that this would have on the hill business and the wider local economy, Highlands and Islands Enterprise purchased a SnowFactory and 8 TR8 Snow Cannons from TechnoAlpin in an attempt to ensure at least some snowsports on CairnGorm, this winter. This post looks…
[The original section of this post that dealt with the enforcement of byelaws against campervans contained faulty information, based on that originally supplied by the LLTNPA, and has been corrected (see here)]. The Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority’s camping byelaws come back into effect today within the four camping management zones in the…
[This post was sent as a letter to the Badenoch and Strathspey Advertiser, which has been providing excellent coverage of the funicular failure, and should appear in that paper today] In March 2018 I applied to Highlands and Islands Enterprise under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act for the ADAC Structures report into the funicular…
At the end of November, I took a critical look at the Balloch Charrette, the community planning event that took place in 2016 (see here) AFTER the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority had already committed to Flamingo Land going ahead. Out of the event came an Action Plan (see here) complete with lead partners…
Scotland’s Forest Strategy 2019-29 launched 10 days ago contains not a single reference to National Parks. There is just one reference to Caledonian Forest and that is within a paragraph which describes the range of woodland in Scotland. Nothing is said about the place of the Caledonian Forest in expanding forest cover across Scotland despite…
The Report in the Strathy last week was based on the proposals for winding up the former Cairngorm Mountain Ltd (CML) which the Administrator has lodged at Companies House (see here). This post takes a further look at what it reveals about the mismanagement of Cairngorm Mountain over the last five years. Background note…
Yesterday, I received a copy of a paper on the development of the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority’s Camping Development Strategy which had been considered by their “Delivery Group” on 22nd November 2018. This post will take a look at what that paper tells us about the adequacy of provision for campers in…
Following my post (see here) on the flawed and unfair procurement process which resulted in Cairngorm Mountain Ltd being sold off to Natural Assets Investment Ltd, I have started to work out the costs to the public purse to date of that disastrous decision. The HIE Board should be doing this that would mean them…
While Highlands and Islands Enterprise announced last week that the funicular railway would be closed for the rest of the snowsport season on safety grounds, they have kept secret the three Improvement Notices served by the Health and Safety Executive in early December (see right above). While HIE has been keen to demonstrate that it…
I am pleased to report that following my post in November about the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority’s (LLTNPA’s) unlawful application of the camping byelaws (see here), that they have started to address the issue of unlawful “No camping” within the National Park”. This post will first take a look at the law…
Most of the Information Requests that activists have submitted to Highlands and Islands Enterprise about Cairngorm are now being deal with under the Environmental Information [Scotland] Regulations 2014 rather than the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act, though both pieces of legislation are broadly similar. The EIRs place a duty on public bodies to make environmental…
In June Parkswatch exposed the unlawful warning system the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority had introduced along with the camping byelaws (see here). Staff had no legal authority to introduce such a system, were failing to inform people who were warned of the consequences or their rights, and were retaining personal data about…
Charrette is the fashionable name given to events ostensibly designed to include and empower local communities in respect of local planning processes. The name appears designed to discourage and disempower, unless you happen to be French. Still, if well run, incomprehension can change to active participation while ideas and proposals can be produced and converted…
There are very serious legal issues about the way in which the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority have tried to implement the camping byelaws which up until now they have tried to sweep under the carpet. The most significant legal issue arose early last year when the LLTNPA was forced to drop its…
HIE yesterday announced a new £27m vision for Cairn Gorm (see here), along with a video and Executive Summary (here). The figures dwarf the £4m they had previously identified as necessary to secure the future of CairnGorm Mountain Ltd and Natural Retreats. There are three good things about the announcement. First, that a public agency…