Pylons in Mid Wales

Have to congratulate Glyn Davies who really has taken up the fight against the proposed pylons which will be necessary to serve future windfarms and who has linked the whole issue back to the Welsh Assembly Government's misguided TAN 8. TAN 8 was hastily prepared based largely on the capacity of the Welsh landscape to accommodate wind turbines. Effectively what the WAG planners did (with the support incidentally of a Powys planning officer seconded to the WAG to help prepare the document!)was to undertake a sieve mapping exercise. Land within our National Parks and AONBs were omitted completely leaving the windy Mid Wales landscapes as the main development opportunity. I understand that the energy people at WAG did not participate in the exercise and neither was the Highway Agency involved. The MOD was uninterested. The result was an over-simplistic, essentially desk-top exercise but the resulting planning policy has taken on far greater importance than it was ever envisaged. At the time WAG was keen to explain that it was a guide for individual local authorities to develop and detail up as a proper planning tool. Instead however, authorities such as Powys and Ceredigion neither had the in-house expertise or the finacial resources to buy-in consultants to develop an effective landscape assessment model. We are left with developers ruling the roost, commissioning the very best national landscape consultants that money can buy and who have run rings around our local authorities. Where applications have been refused, Inspectors at appeal have had to pay regard to TAN 8 as the only adopted planning policy approach. It is only now that people have woken up to the realities and by not consulting properly with the Electricity Companies and the Assembly highway agency at the time, we are left with the ridiculous situation where pylons are necessary to carry the energy into the national grid and our towns and villages are going to snarled up with traffic for years to come. TAN 8 should be reviewed and abandoned as a hastily prepared, uninformed simplistic planning policy tool.

Good on the Montgomeryshire public who are now prepared to take action and to Iolo Williams for his commitment. What a good site the campaign has:
http://www.peopleagainstpylons.co.uk/latest-news