BREAKING: Eastgate Centre wins Academy Street case against Highland Council after Lord Sandison rules the consultation ‘unlawful’
Highland Council’s plans to revamp Academy Street have suffered a major setback after Scotland’s highest court found the local authority’s consultation was “unlawful”.
The owners of the Eastgate Shopping Centre challenged “the validity of decisions of the Highland Council to progress with proposals to redesign Academy Street” which are aimed at “greatly restricting vehicular traffic on the street”.
The council initially proposed one idea which was consulted on, before changing it at the last minute, altering the plan without, the business community says, engaging on aims to slash traffic by more than 70 per cent.
In a judicial review published today Lord Sandison said that the consultation process carried out by the council was not only “unfair” but had strayed into “unlawfulness.”
He said: “The consultation exercise failed to assist the respondent [the council] not only to choose whether or not to take any action, but to select which course of action it might most advantageously take.”
He said that this in turn led to “a legitimate sense of injustice on the part of the petitioners [the Eastgate Centre] and, it may be, others in a similar position to them” – such as other city centre businesses.
And he said that while he did not believe that council officials were guilty “of any subjective intention to run a substantively unfair consultation”, objectively it was a different matter.
He said: “Objectively viewed their actions were calculated to, and did, produce a consultation which was unfair to and beyond the point of unlawfulness” and consequently the council’s decisions “were predicated on that unlawful consultation”.
Throughout the saga city centre businesses consistently claimed they were not consulted on the final plan, that councillors and officials never properly took onboard their concerns and ignored their questions.
More to follow…
