The area to the East of the "park", between Oldwood Place and Lady Place, is referenced by the council as HLv115 (and also as Eliburn East 24). It has been changed by the council from green space to residential use in the local plan and has been earmarked for housing due to commence in 2009.
This contravenes the recommendations from the 2005 open space strategy. Incidentally, this document clearly identified the site as "Natural / Semi-natural Greenspace”. 

Neighbouring sites such as Elv21-26 did not have this identification, so it is clear that the change of use of HLv115 is not in line with the open space strategy, and that Eliburn Park on its own is not enough to fulfil all the recommendations.

We have been advised on a couple of occasions that local residents have had several opportunities to comment on the Local Plan and object to the change of use of HLv115, and that a full public consultation was carried out. However, there has been no direct consultation with residents.
It seems the majority of residents were not aware that such a process had happened. It is obvious that the consultation was poorly publicised.
How can one object to something if one does not know there is something to object to?
The process does not appear to be transparent. West Lothian Council have admitted making mistakes along the way (such as paragraphs and references being omitted in error). The documents relating to the Local Plan are extremely complex, with paragraphs being referred to only by numeric reference. In a nutshell, we know that West Lothian Council has changed the use of the land from a green space, to a space for housing.

With such a bold decision being made, we would have expected direct consultation with the local residents, along with direct notification from West Lothian Council.
WLC had to follow a process by which reporters had to assess the changes made in the local plan. The overall arguments used by the reporters could be applied to any area currently classed as green, leading to further overdevelopment and totally inadequate use of land. Furthermore, West Lothian Council are under no obligation to follow the reporters’ conclusions and recommendations. In other cases, WLC have overruled the reporters' findings.


Please read more in the Green Space section.