GETTING any renewables project through planning can be a very challenging experience, particularly a major infrastructure project. Pat Hawthorn, a partner in law firm Shepherd and Wedderburn’s planning and environment team, points out that, from the outset, the consenting process is not a rapid affair. 
 “If the consenting authority follows the process properly, then it should be approving strong projects. The whole system should be geared towards delivering the right decision at the end,” she notes. 
Shepherd and Wedderburn has worked on offshore wind projects north and south of the border over the past ten years and Hawthorn points out that the two jurisdictions have some real differences when it comes to the approvals process. 
“The English system is a labour-intensive and legalistic process. What it has going for it though, is that decisions have to be made within a certain timeframe. We have worked within the English process for a number of major offshore wind farm applications now, and it is a great help to know that a consent or refusal has to be delivered within a fixed period of time, broadly speaking,” she says. 
The English approvals process is designed to ensure that proposals undergo extensive public consultation (arguably to the point of consultee fatigue on occasion) and are thoroughly tested in a series of open hearings. 
The Herald: By way of contrast, Hawthorn notes, the Scottish approvals process is based on the 1989 Electricity Act, which was not designed to deliver the scale and complexity of infrastructure involved in offshore wind projects. 
“We are working with a different generation of consenting regime here in Scotland, one that the offshore industry, lawyers and Scottish Government are trying to upgrade to make ‘fit for purpose’. We are in a much better place now than we were five years ago,” she explains. “However, it begs the question of whether we persist with incremental improvements and amendments to the Act, or instead, introduce a new process for significant infrastructure at some stage, as has been done in England.”
The last thing anyone wants is to stall large-scale development across the renewables sector while a new Act is being drafted, consulted on and finally turned into law. 
In some respects, the UK Government got lucky with the timing of the introduction of its new Planning Act. It was introduced in 2008, just in time for a very significant offshore wind licensing round (and a rather large nuclear facility). 
 One of the most important issues for Scotland’s consenting regime to get to grips with, Hawthorn suggests, is that if it takes up to a decade for a complex proposal to go through the preparation, consultation and consenting process, there has to be a way of accommodating advances in technology during that period without having to restart the process.
 “We have seen, and will continue to see, enormous technological innovation in renewables,” she says. “As a developer of a project you want to be able to upgrade your consent to take on board the latest technology – that is obvious. It is also vitally important, given that the industry as a whole is under tremendous pressure to cut costs and bring down the price of renewable power generation.”
 In Scotland, the time it takes for decisions to be made is also a concern. “For the last round of offshore wind licensing we were promised nine months for consenting decisions. That was massively over-optimistic,” says Hawthorn. “Developers need some certainty as to when they should expect to get a decision. It’s getting better, but we should be trying to work to a programme and I don’t think that 12 months is an unreasonable aspiration if everyone involved is properly resourced and trained.”  
The next licensing rounds are imminent so wholesale review of the system may not be timely, but we do have time to talk about further improvements to timescales for decision-making and ensuring our consenting bodies and statutory consultees are well prepared for what’s coming their way.