East Renfrewshire Council and Sustrans slammed by village trusts.
A charity backed project in East Renfrewshire has been abandoned after the local council and Sustrans both pulled support.
The Link, a proposed walking, cycling and wheeling route between the villages of Neilston and Uplawmoor utilising a disused railway line, will no longer be carried out after East Renfrewshire Council (ERC) and Sustrans withdrew their backing.
Work has been ongoing since 2019 to progress the project, with Neilston Development Trust (NDT) and Uplawmoor Development Trust (UDT) consulting with landowners, community members, designers, funders and the council.
But the charities have now said that after “thousands of hours of volunteer time, and £200,000 of public money”, the project has “hit the buffers”.
In a joint statement, NDT and UDT said that several reasons for the council’s reservations about the future of our project were put forward over the past year, with the charity listing pressures on local and central government budgets, short-termism in public revenue funding, and staff changes in other organisations
The charities said “anger and frustration” towards ERC and Sustrans is “reasonable” following this outcome, saying the working group formed to direct the project was “never an equal player”.
They added: “We thought we were playing by the rules, backed by our patron East Renfrewshire Council (ERC), which was represented at all our deliberations. We were encouraged by the strategic status of our project and local elected representatives were enthusiastic.
“We thought that our prosecution of the project was thorough, and mindful of Sustrans’ due process with regard to the deliverables required for each stage.
“There is a deeper and ultimately more significant point to be made. Here you have a community-led project, with financial and political endorsement for its efforts - the envy, you might say, of many a community’s bright idea. But when push came to shove it failed. Why? To use the sporting analogy, the Link was a promising extra who reluctantly had to go when the budget got tight and the coach already had too much on his plate.
“Put simply, if we had been ‘at the table’, we could have been appraised of basic impediments to the project’s survival much earlier. Were we always the poor relation?
“In our view, the Link is the victim of faulty process but also of a culture which fails to understand the energy and commitment of local people for change in their place. Sometimes those aspirations need the input of skilled professionals, and out of that can come a very rich product which has more chance of being locally ‘owned’ than one visited from above after some ‘consultation’ process.”
A Sustrans Spokesperson said: “Funding previously awarded to support the Neilston to Uplawmoor project was received from our Places for Everyone programme, an active travel infrastructure fund backed by Transport Scotland.
“As communicated to partners in 2024, the Places for Everyone programme will close in December 2025 as Transport Scotland move to a model of awarding funding directly to local authorities through the Active Travel Infrastructure Fund (ATIF).
“As part of this managed transition, it is now at the discretion of local authorities - in this case East Renfrewshire Council - to decide whether to progress with existing, community-led projects.”
An East Renfrewshire Council spokesperson added: “We’re unable to take the development of the project forward in its current form due to a number of complex challenges associated with this proposed link.
"A number of active travel links are identified in the Council’s adopted Local Development Plan 2, but remain an aspiration, as we don’t have the resources to progress them at this time.”
