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.
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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.