City Plan 2030 – you know it makes no sense - John McLellan

The Duchess of Cornwall, now Queen Camilla, visits The Shortbread House of Edinburgh in 2014

If anyone doubts Edinburgh Council’s shambolic City Plan 2030 is a threat to business, one successful local company has spoken for many about the danger to hundreds of livelihoods.

Edinburgh’s blueprint involves forcing 400 businesses out of town to make way for houses, and one such site is occupied by The Shortbread House of Edinburgh, a high quality Bonnington-based bakery which employs 60 people.

“Over 30 years we have developed a team of bakers who have developed the skills that are essential to the creation of our products and who live locally,” said director Rupert Laing in his response to the council consultation.

“Pushing the business out of the city would not only blatantly run all over the City of Edinburgh Council’s ’20-minute neighbourhood’ goal but would also lose us many of our valued workforce.”

And he argues that even if they remain, turning an industrial area into residential would make deliveries impossible because of the impact on new households, and he warns any compulsory purchase order would not compensate for the disruption.

“By investing millions of pounds in bespoke infrastructure and packaging machinery that specifically fits the building, the site as a whole is worth so much more than the land and buildings value of the site,” he said.

And it’s not just them, with neighbouring businesses Pea Green Boat bakery, the Campervan brewery and Ramsay Cornish auctioneers also in the targeted zone.

The former planning convener Neil Gardiner claimed the plan, “makes economic and environmental sense.” Senseless, more like.