UKH

In Scotland, if you wanted to make a planning development (new houses/flats/restaurant/shop/whatever) and the planning permission was granted with a condition from the roads people saying "hey, that's fine, but you'll need to widen the public road your development will use for access on section X to Y to compensate for the increased traffic", how does that go down when the person who owns the land the road is to be expanded into doesn't want it to happen?

Can the person who owns the land simply refuse to let it happen? Is there a legal way to make it happen? Does someone have to buy the area the road is expanding into? Is it the council or the developer? Does the developer have to start doing court case stuff?

Does the developer do the road widening? Or is it the council? How does it work if it's the council, do they put it out to tender and then just bill the developer for the cost of the contractor that the council decides to accept, or what?

This is for a friend who is very keen to get some information about it (they are not the developer). Would be great to hear from anyone who either has professional or personal experience of something like this.

Planning permission doesn't override land ownership. No one can build on land they don't own. The developer would have to see if they can buy the land they need or they won't be able to build their proposed development.

Hmm, so there isn't any sort of eminent domain type of solution that could come into play because it is an enhancement of a piece of public infrastructure at the end of the day?

Highway authorities are quite possessive about who messes about repairing or altering their roads. Any work would need to be done by their direct works dept or approved private contractors,  then inspected/ tested .

Often a bond has to be paid to cover the cost of the work if the developer tries it on and just builds their project without doing the highways bit.

The developer may be allowed to get their own contractor to do the work subject to paragraph 1.

How these negotiations between planning, councils, authorities and developers are conducted was above my pay grade but fairly common on big developments.

Try putting these questions to  highways and local  authority  ?

Contact John @ Planning Objections Scotland https://pos.scot - he knows Scottish planning law inside out (in particular the discharge of conditions etc. 

Thanks. The development in question is actually very small and the road improvement is similarly small but it sounds like the overall method of doing this kind of thing would be similar to a very large project.

Very useful to hear how the system works for getting that work done in terms of who negotiates it and who does it and so on.

Thanks. The application is still being evaluated at this stage but it's already got dozens of objections and multiple revisions of the plans, I think it might be a case of waiting for the planning decision to see how they have weighed the objections and what conditions are attached, otherwise I might be wasting his time with a lot of speculation.