Council chiefs are being urged to take groundbreaking legal action to evict Travellers from an authorised camp in rural Kinross-shire.
Families living at the remote Crookmoss site face having planning permission revoked after failing to comply with a series of enforcement orders, The Courier can reveal.
If Perth and Kinross Council agreed to withdraw consent granted nearly two years ago, it will be the first time such action has been taken in Scotland.
Councillors have now agreed to give the Crook of Devon Travelling community one last chance to bring the site up to standard.
The site was granted retrospective consent to house up to 15 Gypsy/Traveller caravans in 2013, despite objections from residents.
Villagers were upset about the visual impact of the camp at Crookmoss, which was previously a rubbish dump, claiming that caravans, vans and portable toilets were blighting views of the Ochil Hills and posing a health risk.
As a condition of planning permission, applicants were told to sort out drainage, arrange a clean water supply and take steps to limit the noise of power generators.
However, none of these steps has been completed, despite enforcement action being taken by the local authority.
Councillor Willie Robertson led a call for action after receiving repeated complaints from the community and residents living near the site.
“We gave planning consent for this development some 18 months ago, but they’ve actually been on site for about four or five years,” he said. “Unfortunately, in that time very little has been done to meet all the conditions that were set.”
Mr Robertson said: “The site itself is still without clean running water, drainage, any form of screening and none of the noise mitigation measures which were promised have been put in place.”
He said the surrounding community had no problem with the site being used for Gypsy/Travellers in principal: “However, the occupants continue to be bad neighbours.
“Even after all this time, there’s no mains power on the site and as a result, they have to rely on generators and this causes serious noise nuisance for people surrounding the site,” he said.
“It shows that the applicants and occupants have total disregard for the people living around them.”
Mr Robertson said that following complaints, council officers had visited the site and persuaded occupiers to move the generators.
But he said the site users had simply moved the machines back once the officials had left.
“We, as councillors, have to continually apologise to members of the public and community councillors and make excuses about this,” he said.
“I think it’s about time that we drew a line in the sand and withdrew planning consent.”
Councillor John Kellas said: “During the approval process we hoped that these conditions would be adhered to by the applicant, but there seems to be a total disregard for that.”
He asked for officers to investigate alternatives to a complete revocation of planning permission, which could end up leaving the council with significant costs.
The council’s development quality manager Nick Brian said: “One of the difficulties we have had is not getting the level of cooperation we would have liked from people living on the site.
“Enforcement action has already been taken, but so far we haven’t been successful in achieving a satisfactory outcome.”
He advised against action to revoke planning consent, because it would force the council to take further action to evict the occupants from the site.
Mr Brian assured that enforcement action would be pursued more robustly.
The development management committee agreed to review the situation in six months’ time, if planning conditions were still not met.
Last night, one of the men who successfully applied for planning permission for the Crookmoss site, James Johnstone, said he had moved out two years ago.
He said: “I know that the people who are living there now are working to get this sorted. There will be no need to take this kind of action.”
A spokesman for the council’s planning department said: “Revocation of planning consent is a formal and very unusual approach. There has never in Scotland been a revocation of planning consent, contrary to the wishes of the owner, so it would be uncharted.
“It would be much more realistic to use the enforcement powers that we have.”