Planning, policy, and public trust in energy development
On this episode of the Hypercube Energy Podcast, Adam Sroka speaks with James Jamieson, Vice President of Business Development at Starlight Energy, about the role planning plays in delivering renewable energy projects and why it remains one of the most human parts of the energy transition.
James draws on experience across local authority, consultancy and developer-side planning to explain how decisions are really made, how projects move through the system, and why planning is ultimately a policy-led process. He shares how that perspective helps him work across authorities, consultants and communities while balancing commercial priorities with local impact.
The conversation also looks at how planning is changing as renewable projects scale, how biodiversity and social value are being built into projects earlier, and where AI helps reduce administrative burden without replacing human judgment. Adam and James discuss the limits of AI-generated objections, the importance of trust in the planning system, and why better public understanding of planning will be essential if the UK is to deliver infrastructure, housing and net zero ambitions at the same time.
Adam and James cover:
- James’s path through local authority, consultancy and developer-side planning
- Why planning is policy-led and how decisions get made on contentious projects
- Biodiversity, social value and balancing development with local impact
- AI in planning, including where it helps and where it creates friction
- Trust, community engagement and the future of public participation in planning
Explore more with Starlight Energy
Visit Starlight Energy’s website
Learn more about NextEnergy Group
Connect with James Jamieson on LinkedIn
CHAPTER MARKERS
Chapter markers
[00:00] Meet James Jamieson – Starlight Energy
[02:56] Working across local authority, consultancy and developers
[04:40] Why every energy project is different
[06:53] Developing projects across global markets
[08:27] The role of NextEnergy Group and biodiversity strategy
[12:25] Biodiversity net gain and long-term environmental impact
[14:54] Balancing commercial goals with community impact
[16:55] How planning decisions are really made
[19:15] Digitisation and how planning processes have evolved
[21:25] Where AI helps in planning systems
[25:09] Using data and AI in infrastructure development
[27:15] AI-generated objections and pressure on the planning system
[31:15] Responsible use of AI in planning decisions
[32:47] Future opportunities for AI in planning
[36:26] Trust and relationships in the planning system
[38:26] Education and public understanding of planning
[40:58] Political use of AI in planning objections
[41:58] Final thoughts on planning, AI and the future of energy projects
TRANSCRIPT
Hypercube Podcast Transcript
Title: Planning, policy, and public trust in energy development
Host: Adam Sroka
Guests: James Jamieson
James Jamieson (00:02)
So planning is not a popularity contest. It’s not a referendum. It’s a policy driven process.
And it’s the more contentious applications, those larger applications that make it up to committee. And I think, people can sometimes struggle to understand why even if they’ve spoken to the councillor and the council understands their concerns, the council would have to take a step back and approve an unpopular application nonetheless. But I think it’s still really important that decisions are made by people and our decisions are
made in a way where people can see how the decision making processes has evolved and how they’ve got to that stage.
Adam Sroka (00:55)
Hello and welcome back to the HyperCube podcast. I am joined in person today by James Jamieson, is vice president of business development, planning or star energy. James, great to we have you here. Great to see you in Glasgow. If you wouldn’t mind, could you introduce yourself and your role at Starlight for the audience?
James Jamieson (01:15)
Yeah, thanks Adam. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me on. Yeah, so like you said, I’ve got a rather kind of grandiose sounding title of Vice President Business Development, but I’m essentially a town planner. I sometimes will forecast me what I do for a living. I say I’m a planner by trade. I’ve started saying I’m a lapsed town planner because it’s a long time since I any urban planning or town planning. I’ve been working in the energy sector for about 15 years now.
But yeah, essentially I lead the planning environmental team for Starlight Energy in our Glasgow office. ⁓ Starlight is part of the wider NextEnergy group. We’re the development company at the sort of start of the project process. We work alongside NextEnergy Capital, who are the asset managers, and Wise Energy, who are the kind of site managers at the tail end once sites are up and running and constructed and they oversee construction and operation.
processes as well. So yeah, we’re a team of six or seven in Glasgow, we have a couple of colleagues in London, but yeah, we’re part of the wider Next Energy Group of about 400 people.
Adam Sroka (02:23)
Amazing. One of my best friends at school growing up, his dad was a town planner and he had like this dogmatic rampage against mini roundabouts. He had this whole thing about how that was just like terrible road planning. so I’ll get your thoughts on that a bit later. But it’s a really interesting background because you’ve worked in local authority, you’ve worked in consultancy, you’re now on the developer side. It’s like a really good mix of…
perspectives and skills to bring into kind of the energy sector. How does it help shape like the work you do and the way you kind of show up?
James Jamieson (02:56)
Yeah, it’s a question. mean, the having worked in all those three roles over the years, ⁓ the key thing about planning is you apply for planning permission. You can’t get anything done without the planning authority. And you typically we have consultants working alongside you as part of your project team as well. Having worked in all those roles myself it means it’s a lot easier to get yourself into the kind of mind frame of the person on other side of the table or the other team members. ⁓
Planning is very collaborative profession. ⁓ It’s a contact sport, getting in touch with people and making decisions in person is lot easier than remotely or by email. ⁓ So the nature of the job is that you know, hopefully quite a lot, but sometimes just a little bit about a lot of different things. ⁓ So being able to understand where those different stakeholders and decision makers and advisors are coming from. ⁓
Helps you get better advice, helps you get better results. And I always think about trying to maximise the benefits for projects and minimise the impacts on local communities or receptors or whatever the issues might be associated with each project. yeah, having worked across the spectrum of those sort of main three roles gives you an insight into the decisions that are arrived at, both from the decision making point of view, but from an advisory point of view as well.
Adam Sroka (04:19)
One of our previous guests talked about how there are no vanilla energy projects left in the UK. And I imagine it must be so easy to bump into a piece of legislation or a flavor of stakeholder that you’ve just never ever seen before that’s deeply complicated and lots of people care about with their whole soul. Is that the case in the kind of projects you’re looking at?
James Jamieson (04:40)
Yeah, I mean, I think by personality, I like doing new things and trying new experiences. Planning is a very varied profession. You get involved in all sorts of different things. You know, you can be wrestling with some sort of thorny legal issue one day or one morning. And then by the afternoon. you’re reviewing an ecology report or, you know, out on site doing some photography work or speaking to a member of the public. So despite the fact I’ve been doing, you know, focusing on solar projects for the last 12, 13 years.
⁓ There is still a huge amount of variety in the job and each project is different. ⁓ You know, Working with a local community ⁓ who are supportive or, know, pretty relaxed about a scheme is obviously a great thing. You can then, you know, go two miles down the road and you we have a very different experience. So every project is slightly different. The issues are always slightly different and getting to the bottom of what people, what makes
people tick, be that the planning officer or some consultees or members of the public near the site is really interesting and a good way of working out what the key issues will be in each site. Working in infrastructure is interesting because you travel around even internationally, a road is a road. You might drive in one side or the other. You can instantly pick up a pylon or some overhead lines, but other sectors, housing for example, you could just about work out.
where you are in the world from the style of architecture or the style of housing that you see in a photo or if you’re abroad. So whilst infrastructure is infrastructure wherever you go, it’s the kind of people behind that, the decision-makers behind that that vary and getting to know those and developing your soft skills to be able to work across borders and with different groups and different stakeholders is a really rewarding part of the job.
Adam Sroka (06:29)
That always surprises me because you’ve at Starlight, you’ve grown across multiple countries, developing all over the place. It always surprises me that you are able to manage that complexity and going into different legal system, like different local government structures, everything. To me, that sounds incredibly difficult and like managing a lot of chaos. Like how does that play out in reality?
James Jamieson (06:53)
Yeah, I mean, we’re lucky in that we’re part of a larger group that has, you know, we all got together in the autumn for a sort of get together or nextival. And I can’t remember the precise number, but I think there are over 100 nationalities in the group. we are a global operation. ⁓ We benefit from all those different nationalities, people understand the way of working in different countries. Some parts of the job travel well across borders, some of the technical support.
For example, we do some design work and some photo montage work for different parts of the world and projects in Canada, for example. ⁓ The planning side of things, whilst a lot of the soft skills, negotiation, persuasion, project management travel well across boundaries and you can help out your colleagues, you we have to we have that local knowledge of the law or the regulations. And like a lot of international businesses, we’ll try and…
work with local suppliers and local stakeholders to ensure that whilst we’re bringing our ⁓ sort of global brand and global presence, we respect the kind of local issues by working with stakeholders and advisors and suppliers who are really well embedded into the local supply chains and landscape, business landscape.
Adam Sroka (08:09)
Yeah, and I wanted to go on to asking about the wider Next Energy Group because it sounds like it’s giving you that global distribution, that kind of global locality, but am I right in thinking it actually like the platform that it brings with it gives you kind of a lot of additional benefits in the way you’re doing work.
James Jamieson (08:27)
Yeah, definitely. mean, the DNA that runs through the group is, you know, really sort of beds in the approach that Starlite takes at the start of the project. for example, we as a group we have a nature strategy, which is, you know, a commitment to improving the biodiversity on and around our sites across our, you know, extensive portfolio. And that we we have to we we have to commit to that. And at a very early stage of developing a project. So when we look at the land,
We work at how much land we need, what kind of land, its location, grid connection. ⁓ But whereas maybe five years ago or so, the idea of enhancing biodiversity on or around a development site was a bit of an afterthought, now it’s incorporated in from the start. ⁓ And that just reflects the approach that Next Energy Group is taking as a whole and the sector takes as a whole ⁓ and the importance of the biodiversity recovery alongside
tackling climate change by decarbonizing the energy sector. And we’re also working on our social strategy as a group, which ⁓ Starlight staff we have had some really important input into because we are speaking to local communities, we’re running community engagement events where we’re dealing with on the ground problems that affect local communities. And so we’ve been able to give some advice on sort of
boots on the ground advice about how the best way to open up a conversation in a difficult situation is or reassure people and local communities the impacts maybe aren’t as high as they originally anticipated. And like I was saying, the idea of minimizing impacts and maximizing benefits, you’re always able to do that a bit better if you we have built up a kind of close relationship with those local stakeholders through
ground level political organisations like parish councils or community councils or through individuals who come along to consultation events and you know, he’s trying to get to know them and speak to them as a fellow human being rather than just someone coming along and representing a corporation. And I think part of the reason I enjoy ⁓ working for a developer rather than a consultant or an arm’s length representative is that it’s my name on the application form and my phone number’s there and my email address is there.
I always say to members of the public, if you we have any problems, by all means get in touch, you know, let us know. And I’m sure we’ll come on to this, but some of the part of the problem maybe with use of AI by objectors, you know, to generate lots of objections, sometimes on kind of spurious grounds is that sometimes people with legitimate concerns or legitimate issues that we could probably address pretty robustly, know, solar farms we have quite a…
It’s a straightforward design process and you can, they’re quite flexible in some ways. know, if someone has a specific concern about an impact on a view or, ⁓ you know, a tree consultant says you need to move the panels further back from a tree, we can accommodate that quite easily. But it’s difficult to get to that grainy level of site specific and location specific detail if you’re being around in objections relating to kind of non-issues. There’s this perception that the more objections you submit, the more likely an application is.
is to be refused, which isn’t really the case. You’re just being blunt, you’re kind of wasting the officer’s time because you know, that officer who has to report on all those issues would be better spending his or her time reviewing the really kind of thorny issues and negotiating with the applicant to try and resolve those issues rather than just wading through tens, hundreds of objections on what can be kind of spurious grounds at times.
Adam Sroka (12:05)
Amazing. You’ve touched on a famous subject. There was a lot in there. want to just shout out to Biodiversity Net Gain being a big export of Scotland. I think we were the first to do it in Scotland before England and so on and so forth. It’s amazing to hear that at Starlight you’re actually taking that one step further and going global with it, is amazing, like really cool.
James Jamieson (12:25)
Yeah, I think the tagline is 30 by 30. You know, we’re keen to enhance the kind of biodiversity value of our portfolio by 30 % by 2030. England. yeah, it’s a big uplift. mean, in England, the there’s a statutory requirement now for an uplift of 10%. And that has to be managed for for 30 years. And the wider development construction industry is kind of really wrestling with how they cooperate that into sites. And, you know, the current government is really keen to
and you know, get houses built and new infrastructure built, energy infrastructure, data centers. How do we balance that push for development against, you know, having, you know, high levels of biodiversity on and around sites is, you know, that’s the crux of what it’s like to be for a planner. You’re balancing the development against the impacts. And the interesting thing about the biodiversity and the inside of things in England is that the target is 10% manage it for 30 years.
We always exceed that on solar sites. It’s easier on solar sites than some other forms of development, don’t get me wrong. But at the same time, we’re proud of exceeding that statutory target, knocking it out of the park most of the time. And then we typically apply for planning consent for 40 years of operation. So we’re also able to say to local communities and local authorities, you want 30 and the law says 30, we’re going to do this for 40 and we leave a kind of lasting legacy on the biodiversity side of things.
Adam Sroka (13:49)
That’s amazing. It’s just, it’s something that I’m glad it’s kind of been grudgingly be picked up, but it’s starting to gain momentum elsewhere as well. And to see someone like Starlight really drive forward is incredible. think like energy is so like that. It’s such a lovely industry for not like optimizing ads or like retail carts, know, online shop. It’s like, there’s a physical thing. There’s the environment. There’s people’s lives that you’re touching and
like you are leaving a lasting impact on the world. And I think being forward thinking and, trying to bring it all together is challenging, quite noble. And I guess like you end up, it must be hard to make the judgment calls because like evil corporate mega overlord like says, optimize profit, right. And who cares? Like, I we have everything. Let’s go. But there is a cost function. That’s easy. It’s all in pound coins, right?
But where do you make the judgment calls on the social part or do you just we have to lead from your core principles?
James Jamieson (14:54)
This is a balance. It will never be fully, totally optimized from a commercial perspective. There are always impacts that we have to be mitigated from a design point of view. Because we’ve been doing this for a while and we’ve built up the experience, we can quickly look at land opportunities and realize this looks good or there’s definitely going be an issue with using.
that field over there or we’re going to we have problems with this view or there’s some heritage assets that we need to take into consideration. So by its very nature, the planning system is an interventionary process. It’s ⁓ slightly curtailing those commercial forces. ⁓ And whilst we can find that frustrating at times, obviously, ⁓ and whilst we don’t always agree with the views that are put to us by authorities or third party stakeholders,
you can take a step back and go, well, I’m I live in a country where we we have a robust planning system and there’s the opportunity for everybody to comment on applications and get involved. yeah, those judgment calls, I think, probably we have the light kind of shone on the most brightly when we get to when the authority gets to the decision making stage. Most of our projects by their nature, because they’re large scale, up in front of a planning committee. the planning officer will review the application and work with us and,
negotiate and try and mitigate the impact as best possible and weigh up the pros and cons of the application, make a recommendation to the committee and we then enter the joyful world of local politics. ⁓ So we present the application, objectors will get the opportunity to put their thoughts forward to local politicians and then, and it’s not a job I would envy, they we have to decide whether to approve or refuse the application. ⁓ And that’s when those judgment calls, I think,
become trickiest for us to kind of predict and manage and to work around and difficult for the decision makers as well. They are quite often under, councils are under a lot of pressure from locals who might not be a massive fan of the project, but at the same time, you know, they may be recognize the need to decarbonize the grid in their area, or they do hopefully recognize some of the biodiversity ⁓ benefits. So planning is not a popularity contest. It’s not a referendum. It’s a policy driven process.
And so those tensions between local politics and the kind of policy framework and probably the kind of toughest issues to navigate for decision makers and for applicants and advisors. ⁓ And then there’s the wider kind of issue of, who makes the decisions? And, you know, should it be made by the planning officer? The vast majority of planning applications are made by planning officers, know, house extensions, straightforward applications. They don’t all go up to planning committee. That’d be crazy, you know.
And it’s the more contentious applications, those larger applications that make it up to committee. And I think, you know, people can sometimes struggle to understand why even if they’ve spoken to the councillor and the council understands their concerns, the council would have to take a step back and approve an unpopular application nonetheless. ⁓ But I think it’s still really important that decisions are made by people and our decisions are
you know, made in a way where people can see how the decision making processes has evolved and how they’ve got to that stage. And in an ideal world, I’d love to see a quicker planning system, of course, and most people would. But there’s also a balance to strike between a swift moving process and a process that isn’t so swift that people think it’s, you know, a fait accompli and that, you know, their views haven’t been taken into consideration.
Adam Sroka (18:34)
It’s, I always say about technology and building solutions, ⁓ actually the tech is easy bit. It’s all the humans that make it really hard. Like if you could just tell me what you actually want and not what you say you want. And like I can understand the politics and make everyone agree and work together. I’ll find you all the technology people that make the tech happen. But that first bit is actually really quite difficult to do. I, I’m interested cause you’ve, you’ve
done planning for a while and you’re talking about judgment calls, some of the hard stuff. And we’ve mentioned AI, like how are you seeing planning as a process change for your career?
James Jamieson (19:15)
Yeah, so when I started working in local authority, was probably the sort of I mean, planning was starting to be digitized at that point. You know, the vast majority of applications were that were being submitted were they would all go online. But, you know, this is around about 2007. Applications were still being printed out, four times and submitted and hard copy and all that sort of stuff. that sort of administrative process has now essentially fully digitized.
And it’s never been easier for people to comment on applications and obviously gain information on schemes by going online. you still do get the occasional handwritten objection note when you’re going through some of the comments on your application. I’m always quite pleased to see that probably, you know, an older person that’s, you know, keen to get their point across. And I always think, you know, maybe if you can’t be bothered to type it out properly or write it out, know, are you invested in
the point that you’re trying to make as much as you really think. And you can make it too easy. But you know, that one of the founding or the kind of key components of the planning system in this country is community engagement and the right for everybody to we have their say. And of course, that should be facilitated in a kind of streamlined way. But yeah, the process, mean, broadly speaking, as long as I’ve been doing is essentially the same. But obviously, with digitisation, the access to information is easier.
It’s easier to find information online about schemes, it’s easier to object. We still don’t seem to we have mobilised the silent majority or the other kind of supporters of schemes. That would probably result in more kind of balanced decision making or more balanced understanding. You know, it’s very easy to look at an application with, you know, 20 objections and no support letters and think, ⁓ this must be terrible. But in reality, there’s probably plenty of support of people that, you know, aren’t especially fussed about the application that just haven’t commented.
Adam Sroka (21:07)
Yeah, that makes sense. So what about like going forward in the future? Where do you think there is opportunity for technology and AI to really support versus like what are the core bits that must be said?
James Jamieson (21:25)
Yeah, I mean, I suppose we touched on this earlier when we were talking about, people want to see who’s making the decision. And I was thinking about this ⁓ as I was sort of weighing up some some thoughts for for this podcast. And, it’s interesting when you get your decision notice as a planner, it’s still someone’s name at the bottom. You know, it’s not, you know, Glasgow City Council. It will we have, you know, the planning manager or the head of planning’s name on that. And I think, you know, the decision making process still needs to be human led. And I think there are a lot of opportunities for
AI and the kind of ongoing digitisation process to lift some of the administrative burden. And Planning, you know, is very document heavy and you we have a combination of written reports as well as plans and drawings and all sorts of other stuff, know, spreadsheets are submitted. you know, We we have, you know, As a business, we have however many documents that we we have to manage and we’re looking at ways of managing that more efficiently across the group. And it would be
interesting to see if as a profession, like some other professions we have done, if we could agree a sort of way of working from start to finish that sort of transcends, you know, the applicant into the local authority back to the applicant, because we spend quite a lot of time reorganising our data, reorganising our documents. And It would be good if there was a smoother way of doing that. like I said, you planning is a collaborative profession. And I think since I’ve been doing it, there’s less of a
And as in them sort of relationship between authorities and applicants, far more people work in the private sector now compared to even when I qualified. think when I graduated, I was the only person that went to work for a consultancy. Everyone else went into local authority. think then it was seen, you know, you would do a few years in a local authority and then go and work in consultancy. That’s less of a kind of career trajectory now. So I think that planners I think are maybe a bit…
cautious at times, maybe a bit risk adverse, did I say some of us are a bit slow moving or there’s a perception, you know, even from colleagues and stuff that, you know, we could do with an answer on this and you’re still mulling it over, weighing it up. Maybe we’re well placed to try and work out where that sweet spot, that balance is between leveraging AI and digitisation to take some of the admin burden off officers and other stakeholders in the planning process and freeing up more.
kind of headspace and resource for wrestling with the really thorny issues and the negotiations and the discussions around those key issues.
Adam Sroka (23:52)
think it’s a really exciting space because this like, we’re just on the cusp of all this technology being quite well suited and easy to deploy for these kinds of problems. We did a pilot for an ASLucker developer and they had exactly that problem once a quarter or whatever, huge project once a quarter, had to sit down in the local town hall with this like 400 page printout of the project. And it’s like, when is this getting delivered? When’s that road getting closed? When’s that getting dug up?
And they’re answering questions for hours at a time with the local authority. And the pilot we did was around, actually it’s serve the local authority chat, GBT type interface that allows them to chat to the project. It’s got the latest data in it. get their answers near real time. You get to control. It’s not making stuff up. You get to control what’s in it. And I think the zeitgeist like external to energy is that everyone’s getting used to just chat being the last interface.
We really see benefits in that. And the other thing I always think about is like, intractable is it to go back over the last 15 years of applications that were approved or denied and do a deep analysis on like the themes because up until three years ago, computers just couldn’t do it. It’s poorly structured. It’s emails, it’s spreadsheets. We’re now at the point where actually that’s achievable. can do that.
James Jamieson (25:09)
Yeah, I mean, these are some of the discussions we we have. You know, we spend, like I say, we spend quite a lot of time reorganising our data, even internally as it transfers from us to the funding side of things through to construction and backwards and forwards of queries come backwards and forwards. You know, the ability to kind of standardise that and to rake through it quickly and pull out information would be be would be powerful. And, you know, we use copilot embedded into our into our Microsoft products or some of us do. And that
can be helpful for quickly picking out, when did I mention ⁓ the flood risk assessments impact on whatever it might be, rather than totally relying on your memory. ⁓ At the same time, there’s a balance to strike because you have to know your project well enough to be grilled at planning committee or by stakeholders in a town hall. They don’t want to see you whipping out your phone and quickly looking up the answer or looking for the answer in your files. ⁓
So I mean 10, 15 years of data cross however many planning authorities feels to me like a mammoth task, but you know, picking out those trends over time ⁓ would be valuable to work out where the planning system goes over the next 10, 15.
Adam Sroka (26:24)
And do you think the, so I was going to ask around, you think communities and the public are on this adoption trend of like technology, you’ve suggested that you’re now getting swamped with sort of chat, GBC generated objections. were talking to a regulator actually, ⁓ recently they said they went to consultation about a certain organization becoming a energy supplier and they normally get like a hundred, 200.
responses to a consultation like this, and they got tens of thousands and they are like, almost all of them are large language model produced. And the thing about those is that they’re very verbose. There’s usually like, like to spill their guts and go on and on. And you just think like you’re actually, like you said earlier, like swamping the system, the real deep human thought that’s going to add value to the process, not just like crank the handle.
James Jamieson (27:15)
Yeah, I think ⁓ we talk a lot in the planning ⁓ sector about educating people about what planning actually means. Planning is quite a niche profession. I stumbled across, I really enjoyed geography at school and it’s long enough ago now that I wrote to a university, wrote to Dundee University and asked them to send me a hard copy of their prospectus. I was trying to find geography in the contents and missed it by a page. And town planning was the next page and I thought, that looks really interesting. I’ll do that instead.
⁓ and took a year off between school and university. If I’m honest, didn’t give a huge amount of thought. And it’s, I think it’s kind of okay. But yeah, I asked Jack GBT last night, and I mean, I’m really enjoying studying geography. What careers would you suggest? And you know, it did, you know, it did suggest planning. And so, you know, educating people about what planning is and the reality of it and that most applications aren’t especially contentious and letting, you know, telling communities and
the nicest possible way that spamming the system with subjections about really spurious stuff. It doesn’t really help if anything is going to undermine your case because if you we have a really valid point in there that the applicant sorry that the officer can phone up the applicant or speak to me about and say, but there’s no concern. Can we solve it and we can work together and hopefully reduce that impact or, know, or remove it completely. That’s just going to get lost. And, know, maybe some of these objectors are also the people that think that, you know, we’re ⁓
you know, wasting applicant or wasting authorities time or bringing forward projects that just because they don’t like and they’re not, you know, they’re approaching it from a niche point of view. They’re not sort of taking a balanced view on it. They maybe think that we are not using public resources, especially efficiently, but asking a planning officer to wade through all this stuff is not really helping anybody. ⁓ And if anything, it’s getting in the way of more robust decision making.
Adam Sroka (29:07)
Yeah, I guess like, you asked, there is a finite time budget. What like there is a finite time to these things. What are you as the public spending? Yeah.
James Jamieson (29:17)
⁓ And planning is reporting heavy as well, like I said, in the run up to committee, you know, the planning officer has to write up the report and a key element of writing that report is responding to the points that members of the public we have raised, rightly so. ⁓ there are hundreds of comments in there and they we have to wade through them. And we obviously help them as much as we can, you know, that’s when chatting to other members of the team, know, a key thing I always come back to is our job is to make the officer’s job as easy as possible. We obviously want the application to be approved.
but we also want it determined in a timely manner. if we we have to appeal, we just want to know that there’s an insurmountable issue or a key difference in opinions as there often are in the profession. That’s not a problem. But we want to get to that stage reasonably swiftly. yeah, think letting people know and making people understand that actually spamming the system just doesn’t really help anyone. That said, would say LPAs and
other regulators are cottoning onto it. And there was an interesting appeal decision a few weeks ago where an application for some houses in England or some flats, application was refused, went to appeal, went to a public inquiry. And there was a third party member of the public nearby who used a large language model to generate dozens and dozens of pages of response on heritage matters to the appellant’s submission.
⁓ And it was gobbledygook, it was nonsense. ⁓ that the inspector who was determining the appeal, allowed the appeal, granted planning permission, and actually awarded costs against that member of the public. So the member of public had to pay for the appellant’s heritage consultants time in responding to the nonsense they’d submitted. So it’s quite unusual to see that public.
on engagement in the system is cherished and we encourage people to get involved. We don’t want to be hitting them with fines and discouraging people for fear of financial punishment, but the inspector had obviously had enough in that situation.
Adam Sroka (31:15)
Yeah,
but do you know what? think I wholeheartedly agree with that. think like it’s in the spirit of the system. It’s not an inherently evil system that kind of destroy the environment. It’s got a purpose and we all need to engage with and use it wisely. And yeah, no, I’m, I’m, I’m all on board with that. It’s not just companies that can be nasty with AI.
James Jamieson (31:34)
Totally. Yeah. And the planning inspector actually, you off the back of that, noticed that they we have their own AI guidance. They brought out guidance in 2024 about the appropriate use of AI in paying information for submission. And that relates to people submitting appeals, local authorities, members of the public. And it’s common sense stuff. know, tell us if you’ve used AI, tell us what you used it for, if you’ve changed a graphic, you know, maybe completely…
helpful purposes. you know, if you want to demolish a building, this is how it will change the view. You know, you could maybe use AI to work out that visualization. you know, tell us, you know, that’s not a problem. But I think the issue here was that they hadn’t declared that they’d used this, but it was blatantly obvious, you know, and, you know, the inspector said, it seems apparent that AI has been used to generate extensive and overly verbose objections. You’ve wasted the appellant’s time. You’re going to we have to that bill.
Adam Sroka (32:29)
It’s a funny world isn’t it? It’s very Wild West everywhere. I’m glad the planning’s not to the bedlam that’s going on.
James Jamieson (32:36)
Yeah,
try and keep it at base lately.
Adam Sroka (32:40)
Okay, so what are your, we have you got any hot takes or controversial thoughts or predictions for the years to come?
James Jamieson (32:47)
I mean, think your AI will start to penetrate planning and development processes. We use it in the office. We use it on a day to day basis for bit of research. I go through phases of using it and then come back to it. Some of my colleagues use it lot more extensively. I was doing some highways work the other day and I was able to put a big complex spreadsheet of traffic counts and traffic speeds in and just ask Chatchi BT, here’s the existing…
traffic uses levels on this road, do you think it will result in an inappropriate impact? ⁓ And it came back with a pretty good response, actually. So, you know, started to quote planning policy back to me and it was pretty accurate. And so I think because I don’t use it consistently every day being totally upfront when I do drop in, I’m seeing like an improvement in the quality of the response, which is which is interesting. It was able to go back to me, the kind of policy test in the national planning policy framework. And the ⁓
I think the risk is, and we’ve talked about people spamming the system. There has to be, you we have to constantly check that what you’re using it for is accurate and the responses you’re getting are accurate. ⁓ And a site that’s got a lot of objections that we we have in planning just now, the landowner phoned me up and he was concerned at the number of objections and the depth of the objections and the quality of the objections. And he was saying, they’re case law and appeals and all that sort of stuff. was like, take a look. And then when I looked at it, I realized that
you know, lot of these appeal decisions had been, were hallucinations, AI hallucinations. They did not exist or they were totally unrelated. You know, so it would say this, you know, a very similar solar farm in Oxfordshire was dismissed at appeal. And then you look up the appeal and it’s for a house extension of Barnet or something, you know, we can’t, it has to be sort of checks and balances. can’t encourage carte blanche. We can’t, we can’t encourage that approach carte blanche. It has to be.
some sort of repercussion like the member of public in that appeal who had costs awarded against them. But how do we manage and how do we, police isn’t the right word, but how do we ensure we’re not just wasting time and officers time and scarce local authority public resources by wading through mountains and mountains of AI generated stuff. ⁓ Less is more, but over time the planning system has been asked to take on more and more. ⁓ as ever with planning, we’re coming back around to balance as a balance to strike.
Adam Sroka (35:07)
Well, it remiss of me not to say if anyone’s having struggles with this, but we are here to help. I think on an individual basis, it is quite hard because like the public, most people, most non-technical users won’t know about how do you stop that stuff? Like LLM is a judge and evaluations and all the kind of monitoring you do when you build a robust system. But when it comes to the other side and like actually investing in these systems, there’s a lot you can do to very quickly like
filter and sift through all the noise and ensure that your documents or your produce is factual and it’s pretty straightforward technology now. It’s not science fiction. ⁓ And I think we’ll start to see it get better and better, but like for a lot of energy companies, we have this service we call Calm, which is compliance automation for large language models. And it does the monitoring, it does the health checks, and it makes sure that like no sort of ⁓
pro-republican right-wing propaganda is leaking into all your applications or objections because Donald Trump signed some executive order or whatever in secret. But I think there’s a long way to go across the industry and seeing it like that, we’re not going to see good adoption for the right reason until that trust level is built and we get good outcomes across both sides.
James Jamieson (36:26)
Yeah, totally. Trust is a key word. When I did my masters, I actually wrote a dissertation on the role of trust in the planning system. ⁓ And we talked, you know, the research talks about thin trust and thick trust. So thin trust is like the trust between two people who we have a contract. Thick trust is the trust you we have with a close friend or your family is built on a personal relationship. And in theory is, you in theory, you can’t breach a contract, You do a business deal with someone and you breach that contract. are repercussions, but it’s not real trust. know, it’s
It’s not the trust you we have with, you know, saying to your friend, I’ll meet you 10 o’clock at the train station or something. So contract there, but you trust they’re going to turn up because, you’ve built up that relationship. ⁓ And I think, you know, there is an issue of trust with with the planning system, especially between people who see unpopular developments being approved as a risk. You know, there are trust issues with with large organizations and large public bodies generally. ⁓ I think, you know, working on it kind of comes back to that idea of
of improving education around planning, raising the profile of planning. And it’s really interesting that two of the hottest political topics of our days tackling climate change ⁓ and solving the housing crisis are front and center news. are taking up vast amounts of planning resource. are companies devoting their time to solving those problems. planning has gone up in profile. ⁓
you know, since I’ve started doing it, you know, it’s front page news at times. And has the trust in the system improved over that time? Probably, probably not. ⁓ And you know, the more we do, the more we develop, the more pressure we put on our land resource, which is a scarce resource, the more those relationships will be called into question. And for AI to kind of
jump into that melting pot of relationships and trust and all the dynamics that are swelling around in there as seamlessly as, you know, that’s an impossible task.
Adam Sroka (38:26)
like
one of my family members all of a sudden has gone from like two word birthday card, like these big paragraphs with loads of lovely poetry in it. think, I know your game. We’ve talked a lot about impact of AI and sort of loosely about adoption, but do you think the education of those points is going the right way in the sector?
James Jamieson (38:51)
And in some ways, yes, I mean, think as professional users of the system are conscious of these debates and these issues, members of the public, maybe less so, they just see AI as an opportunity to generate objections quickly and get involved, get their point across. And we’ve sort of talked about how sometimes a really valid point can be lost in the melee of 100 AI generated objections. And I think there’s a real…
responsibility for political leaders, business leaders to make it clear that whilst it’s a really powerful tool, you know, that comes with a lot of responsibility. You know, for example, we we have a site in planning just now, and there’s another site nearby, which is a lot more contentious. And one of the local councillors who actually leads one of the political parties in that district ⁓ generated an AI generated objection, which focused on the grid connection and whether or not the
that project was strategically aligned with the government’s Clean Power 30 plan to try and kind of cut the legs off the principle by saying, you know, it’s not aligned with CP 30, so it shouldn’t be granted planning permission. Firstly, planning policy is really clear that you don’t need to demonstrate that we want to decarbonize the energy sector and that the support and principle is there in policy. But then secondly, he then must we have just asked whatever language model he was using to
to generate it again for our site and just slammed it into our application. So I downloaded it and put it back through ChatGBT. I was like, what do you think of the subject in ChatGBT? And straight away said, oh, this makes no sense. Your project is clearly aligned with CleanPower30 for the following reasons. And I took some advice from our grid engineers and they said, yeah, we’re fully aligned. There’s no issue here. So it’s disappointing to see a counsellor who
within the rights to object to the scheme and take a view, know, opposite of ours, but using AI to generate a factually incorrect objection to try and cut legs off it and then just copy and paste it to apply to our site as well. That’s I don’t think that’s a great example to be setting.
Adam Sroka (40:58)
Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s working on the global political stage. like, just makes me think like, how far away are we from training these models on rhetoric and debate? like when truth is out the window, it’s all becomes goes back to that social charisma piece. that’s a really, yeah, I think we’re just gonna see more of this stuff.
James Jamieson (41:19)
so unfortunate at end, know, being aware of it and being clued up and, you know, appreciating that it is coming and being professionally critical of everything you read is, you know, is a key part of the job. And, know, and, you know, I think some, you we’ve been told in the past by, you know, some planning authorities that we’re good to work with because, know, we’re always keen to find solutions, you know, we’re not too pushy, we’re pushy at some point, you know, we’re frustrated about a delay or whatever it might be.
But there are applicants out there who are far pushier. We’re very conscious of the impacts our projects can we have, the way we work, the resources we’re using. So we’re always trying to operate effectively in terms of what we’re trying to achieve, but also very conscious of the impacts we we have.
Adam Sroka (41:58)
So look, this has been an amazing chat. Thank you so much for joining us today. Before I let anyone leave, I always ask if people would like to find out more about you, more about Starlight, or if there’s anything you’d like to promote or plug, where should we direct them?
James Jamieson (42:12)
Yeah, mean, with the Next Energy Group, can find us quite easily online. Starlight itself, starlight-energy.com. We’re on LinkedIn. You can find us pretty easily as well. And you can find me on LinkedIn without too much drama as well if you want to reach out. ⁓ And yeah, all our applications are online. They’re on the internet already. If you want to read our planning reports and look at our drawings and plans, they’re out there. So yeah, be good to hear from anyone that wants to get in touch.
Adam Sroka (42:40)
Coming to an AI training set near you very soon. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much and good to do yet another one in Glasgow.
James Jamieson (42:47)
Yeah,
it’s great to be working with a local company. great. Thanks for having me on.
Adam Sroka (42:54)
Thank you once again for listening to the Hypercube Energy podcast. As always, if you have any feedback or comments or you want to get involved, please get in touch. And if you want to find out more about what’s happening in data and AI across the energy sector, please join the Beyond Energy community and I look forward to speaking to you soon.
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