Policy & Politics

An independent commission to advise the Scottish Government on a 30-year strategy for infrastructure investment has appointed its final members.

A new National Audit Office (NAO) report has found that the government’s planning system is ‘underperforming’ and unable to demonstrate how it can deliver 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s.

Conservationists are concerned about changes to the regulatory regime for commercial peat extraction that have just come into force. They exempt schemes involving an area of more than 30 hectares from the requirement to obtain planning permission.