Community Benefits Must Be Mandatory Transparent and Enforceable

This is important because the current approach to community benefits has created a significant credibility problem. In many areas where large renewable energy developments are being proposed or constructed, local communities simply do not trust the way community benefits are presented. They are often seen as an afterthought, or worse, as a financial incentive used to make developments appear more acceptable rather than addressing the real concerns being raised.

Most communities are not primarily motivated by financial payments when they engage with the planning or consenting process. Their concerns are usually about landscape change, environmental impact, wildlife, tourism, cumulative development and the long-term character of the places they live. When financial packages are introduced alongside these concerns, they can give the impression that the impacts of major infrastructure can somehow be balanced by funding. In practice, this approach rarely builds trust and often has the opposite effect.

If community benefits are to play any meaningful role, they must be credible, transparent and guaranteed. At present they are largely voluntary, which means communities cannot rely on them and there is little consistency between developments. This lack of certainty undermines the purpose of the policy and creates situations where commitments discussed during consultation may later change or disappear altogether.

The issue becomes even more important when developments change ownership. It is widely known within the energy sector that projects are often sold after consent has been secured. When this happens, the companies that ultimately construct and operate the infrastructure may not be the same companies that presented community benefit commitments during the application stage. Without a framework that ensures these commitments transfer with the development itself, communities are left with uncertainty about whether the benefits they were told about will actually materialise.

There is also a wider question of fairness. Many of the areas hosting renewable energy developments are rural communities that already experience limited local infrastructure investment, higher transport costs and fewer local services than urban areas. At the same time, these landscapes are increasingly being used to host nationally significant energy infrastructure that generates substantial economic value.

If Scotland is asking certain areas to host large scale wind farms, transmission infrastructure and energy storage facilities for the benefit of national energy policy, it is only reasonable that those communities see genuine and lasting benefits from those developments. That should not be left to voluntary arrangements or informal guidance.

The issue is also important from a public safety perspective. Developments that include technologies such as large battery energy storage systems introduce new operational risks that local emergency services may not always be equipped to manage without additional support. Ensuring that local Scottish Fire and Rescue Service crews have the training and equipment needed to respond safely to incidents associated with modern energy infrastructure is a practical and responsible use of community benefit funding.

Ultimately this idea is important because it shifts the focus away from discretionary payments and towards fairness, accountability and long-term community resilience. If community benefits are to exist, they should operate as a structured and reliable mechanism that ensures communities hosting nationally important infrastructure receive a genuine and lasting share of the value created by those developments. Without that shift, the current system will continue to struggle with public confidence and will remain widely viewed as inadequate by the communities most directly affected.