A PEEBLES resident believes “you can’t ever win” against Scottish Borders Council when it comes to making complaints.

Peter Maudsley lodged his objection to the handling of a controversial planning application.

Senior officers launched an investigation after receiving the complaint regarding the traffic and road assessments in relation to an application from Persimmon to erect 71 houses at South Parks.

Members of Peebles Community Council objected to the plans and called for an independent traffic assessment to be carried out on the busy Caledonian Road, which will be used to access the new development.

This call was rejected by council officers and the proposals were given the go ahead last year.

Following this, chairman of the town’s community council Les Turnbull, hit out at councillors on the planning committee who are not from Peebles and making decisions which will be detrimental to the town.

He called out Councillor Jim Fullarton for spouting “ridiculous anecdotal evidence” when he used his experience of driving along Caledonian Road 30 years ago.

The outcome led to Mr Maudsley lodging an official complaint with Scottish Borders Council.

When this was rejected he appealed to the Public Services Ombudsman without success.

Now Mr Maudsley, who is now the planning convenor for Peebles Community Council, said: “I raised a personal complaint with SBC just before I joined the community council. I wasn’t satisfied with the responses given by SBC and subsequently went to the Ombudsman.

“However, the Ombudsman has upheld the council’s responses and didn’t agree with me on any of the points. The council department that I was complaining about had investigated itself and that apparently isn’t a problem.

“We all know that one councillor supplied information that was 30 years out of date and that was explained as not being a problem.”

Mr Maudsley claimed that Scottish Borders Council failed to apply Scottish Government policy and guidelines correctly in relation to Caledonian Road.

He added: “I thought I would’ve won the points with regard to Caledonian Road because if you look at the design manual for roads and bridges, the table that puts the road categories in for UAP4, which is for 1500 cars per hour, says the road should be 6.1 metres in width.

"Caledonian Road for 200 yards is less than 6.1 metres and narrows to 5.5 metres, which the council agreed with.

“However, the decision from the council and upheld by the Ombudsman is that all these are guidelines and open to interpretation.

"So in actual fact, there is no way you can ever win an argument.”