Anne McCall writes:
So, only the fourth day of the inquiry and all my colleagues have deserted me. Our advocate has had to head home for a few days - which we knew about and we'll be using someone else next week until he can return. Everyone else had other things to do and, quite correctly, assumed that today wouldn't be particularly action packed. In fact, it was so lacking in action we finished by lunch time - with very limited flexibility in the schedule there wasn't much scope to yank one of the witnesses from next week forward so we all packed up after lunch.
Before we left it was the opportunity for the Reporters (the 3 individuals appointed by Scottish Ministers to examine the evidence) to question the last Council witness. From this we learnt that there is going to be an affordable housing element to the development - just not located on the site, somewhere else - away from the executive housing. We also learnt that the Council would like to see the 'promotion of sustainable transport', which it transpired, meant a bus stop.
The Reporters know their craft and took the Council rep down a series of pretty testing questions which revealed that the Council believe there will be an impact on the integrity of the area and particularly the SSSI, that the Council accept this but think that economic and social benefits outweigh this impact and that the social benefits are hard to pinpoint but basically came down to money.
The Reporters also asked the Council rep to speculate about how she would feel if all that was eventually built was a golf course and clubhouse given that Mr Trump had mentioned he might wait some time to build the houses until the market was right.....the conclusion was 'pretty disappointed'.
So I get to go home for a couple of nights - away from the delights of my interesting hotel - which seems to be popular with construction guys who watch a lot of football and drink a lot of beer. Hope the fish is still alive!