🌲 Campaign Milestone Update: How We Built This Movement Together 🌲
What started with a simple question has grown into an un-missable community front line. A few months ago, two neighbours posted on the local residents' page about the upcoming development plans, and I was hoping someone with technical expertise would step up to lead. When no one did, I decided to act, starting with just 50 paper leaflets and a blank online petition.
Look at what our neighbourhood has built together since that day:
📈 A Growing Movement: Those 50 leaflets exploded into 2,500 physical drops across Penicuik, driving our online petition past 1,600 signatures and building a vibrant community of over 600 members on our Facebook group.
🏫 Packed-Out Public Spaces: Together, we completely packed out the seven-hour council drop-in event at the library, to the point where staff had to ask us to leave after closing time. When the Special Community Council meeting overflowed, we had to move the entire crowd into a much larger hall, creating an incredible space to hear everyone’s thoughts and collective concerns.
🏛️ Parliamentary Escalation: Our front-line team has traveled to Holyrood twice to raise our technical infrastructure and watershed evidence directly with MSPs. We have backed the Midlothian Climate Action Network (MCAN) environmental statement and supported one another to ensure hundreds of individual objections flooded the council’s inbox.
🌟 A Massive Thank You to Penicuik
While we have a small core team, this campaign belongs to the hundreds of local residents who have pitched in in ways big and small. From printing leaflets and delivering them to doors to sharing data and writing submissions, we have met so many lovely, dedicated people along the way. We could not have done this without all of you.
⚙️ The Next Phase Behind the Scenes
While our massive collective push to hit the submission deadline is officially done, the battle is far from over. Our focus now shifts behind the scenes to the statutory examination phase, where we will be working to make sure the independent Planning Reporter holds the local authority to account over these undeliverable greenfield allocations.
We will keep you updated as the campaign unfolds. Keep sharing the petition link so our numbers continue to grow over the coming months.
Protect Penicuik Green Spaces Campaign Group