9. The ETZ enters Limbo?
The ETZ is still in limbo, even after the announcement of the ScotWind leasing round on 17th January. Activities have been predicated on offshore wind supply chain work coming to Aberdeen but details of successful consortia’s Supply Chain Statements will not be published until agreements between them and Crown Estate Scotland have been signed, possibly in April 2022. Concern has also been expressed about whether consortia will honour these commitments and if there is a mechanism to ensure they do. That is without established foreign fabrication yards being very interested in ScotWind work. Long established scepticism of Scottish construction is not being abated.
The consortium of ONE, ACC and Invest Aberdeen behind it had been able to convince the UK Government to award it £27 million from the North Sea Energy Transition Fund in March 2021 and the ETZ Ltd, which replaced ONE’s Energy Board, obtained Scottish Government funding of a further £26 million out of its £62million North East Energy Transition Fund in June 2021. But there were no firm details in the public domain then and they are till absent. ONE’s energy board was hived off into not-for-profit company, ETZ Ltd, to develop and manage the Implementation Plan, And to that end it appointed Ironside Farrer, tasking it with developing the Master plan that has to accompany any planning application and obtain planning permission in principle, after the 2022 LDP had been adopted, expected to be by 29th July 2022. However, the LDP is unlikely to be adopted until the end of 2022, because of delays throughout the process since its approval by the Council in early March 2020. Ironside Farrar’s chief planner has acknowledged that the project’s programme will need to be reviewed “to look at how various elements are aligned”.
There are still no firm proposals in the public domain: information about ideas was presented at the first of three consultaion events in early December 2021, with the promise of something more definite at the second one, due in early February 2022. The Instruction to Tenderers provided to companies bidding for the Masterplanning Contract warned them they would need to be “sufficiently agile to deal with the changes as they emerge”.
Not surprisingly, OP56, OP61 and the Energy Transition Zone are unresolved issue 17, p 299 – 316 in the report of the Schedule 4s. The rezoning stands, in spite of what the Council acknowledges are well made, valid arguments in the 199 objections to the OP56, OP61 or both, including strong ones from 4 statutory consultees, NatureScot in particular. Which criticised the environmental report for underestimating the Park’s importance to people and wildlife and for ignoring the benefits of the East Tullos burn wetlands and for when discussing OP56 and policy B5, the ETZ. It also states that its loss would be impossible to mitigate. There should be a policy to protect it . SEPA wants OP56 removed from the ETZ because of the damage to water quality and flood risk of developing the Burn, which it also considers has been neglected by the Environmental Report. However, ACC has prioritised what are really uncertain economic gains for the whole Region over the certain extensive damage to the natural and historic environment, and to the physical and mental health of the deprived community of Torry. Yet the planners seem less convinced by economic gains the ETZ proponents used to justify a free rein for ETZ purposes in what will still be green space in ONE’s and AHB’s submissions by not granting it. It is possible that the review might reverse the rezoning.
Even if it doesn’t, any developments will need to clear the hurdle of obtaining planning permission, which will not have been made easier by the ETZ being included as a National Project in the National Planning Framework 4, contrary to the confident expectations of its proponents that it would be. It does not have that status in the draft NPF4, which would have enabled economic imperatives to dominate any others. The South Harbour retains its National Project status..
The feasibility report on Freeports commissioned by City Region and Growth, and presented to the Committee on 11th May regards a City Region area Freeport as feasible, but there are no firm proposals yet. Matters are complicated as the Scottish Government’s has a different Freeport model, a Greenport one, that does not have the features that have given freeports their bad reputation, in contrast with the UK Government’s one, which encourages inward investment by offering tax breaks on it and giving grants. If the two governments do not co-operate, neither model can provide as many benefits as when they do, because of the separation of devolved and reserved matters.. The two governments are currently at an impasse. The Scottish government is continuing with its plans for one Greenport for which 9 ports are competing. It has been claimed that investment in Scotland has been lost as a result.
