Local Government and Communities Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Official Report 544KB pdf

---

Planning (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Under agenda item 4, which is the Planning (Scotland) Bill, committee members will report back on the community engagement events that took place as a result of our call for evidence. The consultation on the bill closed recently, but we are continuing community outreach to get as many views on the bill as possible.

I invite our committee members who were out and about talking to communities over the past few days to report back formally to the committee. We will go to Andy Wightman first.

Thank you very much, convener. I went to the Isle of Skye with Jane Williams, who is the clerk to the committee, and Alan Rehfisch, who is from parliamentary research. We met 13 people on Monday evening, including five community councillors and seven representatives from community groups. I want to thank them for coming. In a rural area such as Skye, they had to travel some distance to get to the meeting. It was a very useful meeting, and I am grateful to those people for committing their time and sharing their perspectives on the planning system.

We had a fairly wide-ranging discussion, and I will highlight four critical themes on which we reached a broad consensus by the end. The first is the proposed local place plans. Representatives had concerns about resourcing of the plans, about whether there will be templates that could be used, and about training for people who will be expected to draw up the plans, who will come from either community councils or community bodies that are recognised under the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. Most of those people will be volunteers and not used to participating in the planning system at this level.

There was broad consensus that, if these local place plans are to be meaningful and if the time required and asked of people who are, in essence, volunteers is to be given, then the plans’ status should be reasonably strong. There was broad agreement that local planning authorities should be required to do more than just have regard to local place plans.

There was a broad welcome for the concept if plans are going to be well-resourced and if they are to become a meaningful part of the planning system. That is a fair summary of where people were at.

Another concern was around delivery. It is important to point out in this context that we went to a rural area. In a rural area such as Skye, a lot of people are not so much concerned about controlling or inhibiting development as people in urban areas can be; they want stuff to happen. They want housing for people in relatively isolated and small communities. Their frustrations were more around the fact that although there can be a local development plan, it might not be implemented. For example, land can be made available where the landowner wants it, rather than where the plan says. There are broader contextual issues around crofting tenure et cetera.

There was a concern around not only the ability to make a good plan, but the ability to get it implemented, in relation to getting hold of the land and doing the stuff that people have agreed that they want to do.

The question of third party right of appeal came up, and it is fair to say there were mixed views on that. There was not a great deal of enthusiasm for it, and there was not a great deal of opposition. That probably reflected the fact, again, the representatives were from groups who wanted stuff to happen—that was their principal concern.

I will not go any further than that. Those were probably the dominant themes that we had teased out by the end of our meeting. We took a full note of what was said, and a draft of that will be sent to participants for their comment. As I understand it, we will be publishing a note of the whole meeting.

I thank again everyone who turned out. It was a very useful initiative as part of our scrutiny of the bill.

I was part of the delegation to Motherwell, which was not exactly a tour for me, as it was just 10 minutes along the road. We had a very good turnout. The discussion with the chief planner, John McNairney from the Scottish Government, warmed people up and got people thinking about the bill’s purpose and what it could achieve. It is fair to say that, in the room, there were various degrees of knowledge about the bill and the planning process. We had a mixture of people there. They were not all from community councils, but the experience of community councils came across quite strongly.

11:30  

A consistent theme from all the speakers who took part was that they want to have influence. They want to be part of decision making, and they see the importance of planning, not just in the immediate term. They see the importance of decisions on individual applications and the direction of travel of development plans, as those things can shape their community for some time to come. There were people there who had had experience of applications for things such as incinerators that did not respect a community council boundary. There were people from right across Lanarkshire who had been working together across local authority boundaries, so that was an interesting dynamic.

The chief planner explained local place plans and took some questions on them. On the one hand, people felt that they sounded quite positive, as they would bring some additionality, but on the other hand people were not sure how they fitted with development plans. People understood that we have a plan-led system and they understood the desire to keep the integrity of the plan-led system, but they were not sure why, if the development plan was working well, people would try to change it. The chief planner talked about how that might be an indication that the development plan, which as we know will move from a five-year cycle to a 10-year cycle, was in need of a refresh. However, people were wondering about how local place plans would be managed if a number of them came forward. Who is the community? In places where there is not a community council, who could initiate a local place plan? As Andy Wightman touched on, how will they be resourced and, ultimately, what weight will be attached to them? Local place plans will not be formally adopted, but be part of the development plan.

People were interested. They were asking how local place plans fit with community empowerment and locality plans. It was felt that they would be another layer of planning that perhaps is not required.

The chief planner talked about the performance of planning and how we can speed up the process and have more people involved, but there was a feeling that there were not that many measures to look at outcomes and quality of place. There was a lot of talk about the quality of housing, but I think that when people were talking about quality of place, they were meaning the quality of their environment more generally.

There were mixed views on appeals and equalising the appeal process. The Government has made the point that it wants to improve the system at the beginning. People were familiar with the pre-application consultation process and the jargon around front loading. They were giving examples of instances in which they had gone along to meetings in a community centre on a Saturday morning and given input, ideas and feedback, but when a formal application came in, their input was not really reflected. They felt that although they were taking part, they were not an equal partner at that stage.

There was a bit of frustration that, in a plan-led system, if the developer is trying to get something that is contrary to the plan, they have the opportunity to appeal, whereas the community does not have that appeal option. That is not covered in the bill, but it is something that people clearly want to talk about.

People recognise that the planning system is very enabling. The system that we have is very pro-development; it is not anti-development. People did not see the planning system as a barrier to getting houses built and getting infrastructure in place, per se. They were talking about issues such as finance and infrastructure, not being able to get to their GP, and the local schools being at capacity. They felt that there were other barriers in terms of infrastructure and amenities that made it difficult to make development viable, and felt that perhaps it was that, rather than a lack of planning consent or encouragement in the planning process, that was stopping house builders from going forward.

It was a really good exercise. Obviously, a lot more than that was covered. Graham Simpson and I were in different groups, so perhaps Graham would want to add to that.

We covered much the same themes. Around my table there was a good mix of people from community councils and community groups. There was somebody from Lanarkshire Deaf Club, a chap representing one of the ethnic minority groups and someone from Motherwell Football Club Community Trust. It was quite a good mix. We covered the same themes: concerns about lack of community engagement and how, in the eyes of the people in my group, the bill does not improve that, and concerns about the local place plans. As Monica Lennon said—Andy Wightman also made this point—people fear that local place plans will not have enough teeth. If people go to all the trouble of preparing one and the council only has to have regard to it, it can then put it on the shelf and pretty much ignore it. There was concern about that.

There were strong feelings in my group regarding a third party right of appeal, which people want. They have a very strong feeling that the current system is weighted one way. That reflects the experiences of the people on my table.

Participants to whom I spoke were concerned about simplified development zones and worried that they could give carte blanche to developers. That could be a good thing or a bad thing, but there was certainly a concern around that. Those are three themes I picked up on.

Simplified development zones were also raised in my group, and people felt a little bit surprised that they would roll back planning controls.

The other point that I did not mention—I do not think that Graham Simpson did either—was resources. People felt that the issue is not just the workload that planners have, but that there is pressure in local government in terms of the input from the roads department, environmental protection and so on. There was a sense that in some areas there has been a reduction in the number of local offices that someone can visit: there is now only one office for South Lanarkshire and North Lanarkshire. There was a feeling that it is a wee bit harder to get information.

There was a bit of discussion about planning fees. Is the system properly resourced? Should planning fees be higher? There was no settled view on that.

I thank members for that. I had the privilege of going to Stonehaven and attending a meeting at Mackie academy with 12 people from the community. They were predominantly from community councils, but there were also representatives from development trusts in the third sector, and one local business person. I thank the parliamentary team who attended and resourced the meeting, and members of the bill team, who were meant just to give a brief overview of the legislation but stayed for the whole two-hours-plus event. Most of all, though, I thank the attendees from across the area who came along to give their views. I will try to summarise their thoughts.

We started off with a discussion about local place plans and, it is fair to say, the associated concerns and opportunities, which are two sides of the same coin. For example, those present were keen to know what we mean by a community in relation to local place plans. How do we define a community? Will the consultation be representative of the community? Will all parts of the community be engaged with the consultation? One person’s example was that you could consult 25 per cent of the entire community, but if they are all over 45 you would not have engaged with younger people in the community. How do you make sure, when you are doing a community consultation to develop a local place plan, that you are shaping the local place plan on behalf of the community? Some people are concerned that there is a danger that that might not happen, although that is not a barrier.

Another theme that came up, which has already been mentioned, was how a local authority will take account of or give regard to a local place plan in a meaningful way once it has been developed. In other words, although people did not expect the council to say, “This local place plan is now our local development plan”, they felt that there should be some connection between the local place plan and the council’s development plan to show how one has impacted on and helped to shape the other. That is a reasonable thing to put on the record.

That brought us to local development plans more generally. There was a feeling that local authorities perhaps do not cover themselves in glory at the moment in how they consult and engage with communities on local development plans. People were really keen to ensure that if we are going to review local development plans every 10 years rather than every five, communities are properly and actively engaged, not just in local place plans but in local development plans. There was some brief chat about how community planning would fit within that process, too.

When we asked people what they wanted from the planning process, the word transparency came up quite a lot. People did not always say exactly where they wanted the transparency, but it came up as a general theme in relation to the planning and development process. A couple of people were interested in whether delegated powers—that is, planning approval by officials—would be used and whether that might affect the democratic link between councillors voting on a planning committee and communities. There was some talk about that.

There was also some talk about planning applications more generally. People welcomed the front loading of consultation—the pre-application consultation—but asked what that will look like and whether it will be meaningful or a tick-box exercise. Who decides whether that process has been meaningful or whether it has been a tick-box exercise? Who monitors performance around that?

Simplified planning zones came up. I think that there was concern about the terminology. Does it mean that developers can just pitch up and do what they like? When simplified planning zones were teased out a bit, people thought they might be in favour of them as long as the community has an input into shaping where they might be, what they might look like and what their purpose would be. There were concerns that they should not just be a green light for development and that, rather than a developer-led process, simplified planning zones should be more about co-production on the part of the community, the local authority and developers.

Finally, there was some general chat about the proposed changes to section 75 of the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997 and planning gain, moneys and how well they are or are not used at present. There was some discussion about the power in the bill to make regulations to introduce an infrastructure levy and some nervousness about whether the levy would be overly burdensome on developers, although others would say that we need the levy for sustainable development. I just wanted to give a balanced view of what we heard, because not all 13 people in a room will necessarily agree with each other, and nor should they.

I think that I have probably teased out most of the themes. I thank everyone who took the time to attend not only the meeting that I held but meetings across the country that were attended by other members. Not all members were able to attend the meetings. Would anyone else like to make a brief—I stress brief—comment?

It is just to supplement what I said following other members’ contributions. Two other issues were raised. They will come out in our summary, but I think that they were quite important. First, we had a representative from the local access panel who was very clear about improvements that need to be made in the planning system around access for disabled people. She gave some quite powerful testimony about the difficulties.

The second issue related to simplified planning zones. We had two people at our meeting who had been working up schemes for affordable housing at the north and south ends of Skye. Housing associations, local people and tenants were on board and the land and money had all been sorted, but when it went through the formal planning procedure, there were objections from statutory consultees. Simplified planning zones are potentially quite an interesting vehicle in such circumstances. Because people are new to the idea, simplified planning zones initially appear to be quite an attractive option. People see them as a means by which a lot of that stuff could get sorted out up front—as soon as a planning application has been agreed they are free to do what they want. The affordable housing people at the meeting thought that the council would insist on design standards of street lighting that are appropriate only for urban areas. They do not want such lighting—they like dark skies and the dark light effect. The same applies to standards of roads. They do not need tarmac—gravel is perfectly sufficient. They saw simplified planning zones as a potential mechanism for overcoming those frustrations.

That is very interesting, and it is now on the record, even though a formal note will be produced of each of the meetings. That probably disposes of what we want to put on the record in relation to agenda item 4. I thank members for participating in that discussion.

11:45 Meeting continued in private until 12:52.