In a Ministerial Statement in June 2024, Paul MacLennan, Housing Minister, set out the Scottish Government's plan for addressing the national housing emergency. The plan is organised under three strategic pillars: delivering more high-quality permanent homes; ensuring that the right homes are provided in the right places; and making sure that everyone has a permanent home.
The Minister recognised the crucial role of a well-resourced planning system in delivering more homes and the Scottish Government has now issued its Planning and the Housing Emergency Delivery Plan outlining a package of measures which it believes will make a measurable difference to the planning system in Scotland, supporting housing development across Scotland in response to the housing emergency. The actions build on the recommendations made by the Competition and Markets Authority for improving planning.
The Delivery Plan focuses on four key objectives to be delivered over the next six months:
- Policy: a strong and consistent planning and policy framework
- Delivery: actively enabling and facilitating development
- Efficiency: an end-to-end approach to improving the efficiency of the system
- Capacity: investing in capacity with access to excellent professional skills
On Policy, the Delivery Plan advises that National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4) is designed to support the delivery of more quality homes, incentivising developers to build out their sites more quickly, but it acknowledges that there is more to be done to support planning authorities and applicants working effectively with NPF4 and so the Scottish Government will:
- Issue further guidance on key topics, including climate, flooding and biodiversity
- Identify mechanisms to stimulate build-out rates of housing sites with planning permission
- Promote good practice in demonstrating community benefits from new housing developments, including new guidance on effective community engagement
On Delivery, the Plan advocates a "Team Scotland" approach to delivering more homes with the clear ambition of using the planning system to make Scotland the most attractive part of the UK for investment. As part of this, the Scottish Government will:
- Establish an action-focused Housing Planning Hub to provide brokerage support for major housing developments which have stalled
- Work with SME housebuilders to better understand the challenges they face with the planning system and identify actions to support them
- Help early adopters to put in plan Masterplan Consent Areas
- Publish new guidance on housing land audits to more fully understand the sufficiency of land allocated in existing local development plans and help planning authorities bring forward their new style development plans with deliverable housing land pipelines and delivery programmes
- Continue to progress compulsory purchase reform to further empower local authorities and other partners to proactively facilitate the delivery of homes through redeveloping vacant and derelict land and refurbishing empty properties
Under Efficiency, the Scottish Government is looking for improvements to performance and practice and will:
- Support the National Improvement Champion to roll out a new framework for performance improvements across all planning authorities
- Encourage the use of processing agreements and pre-application advice
- Advise on streamlining and consistency in validation of planning applications
- Work with Heads of Planning Scotland (HoPS) to develop advice on standard conditions
- Work with HoPS to encourage use of a standard template for section 75 agreements
- Work with HoPS to help align various consents needed in addition to planning permission
- Stop work on the infrastructure levy
- Highlight examples of good practice in development management
- Consider the scope of further permitted development rights (PDR) which could support housing delivery in certain circumstances. A consultation paper on how new or amended PDR might allow the provision of the right homes in the right places has been published, inviting comments until 14 February 2025
The Delivery Plan identifies key issues that need addressed at each stage of the planning process, together with solutions to address them.
The final objective is Capacity and increasing resources in the system. To do that, the Scottish Government will:
- Treble the number of bursaries for post-graduate planning students
- Increase planning application fees, with an expectation that income generated will be re-invested in planning services
- Work with the National Planning Improvement Champion to identify where wider improvement work can help address some of the challenges that applicants, such as SMEs, are facing
- Develop arrangement for local elected member training
- Launch a Scottish Government graduate programme that supports work-based learning to help address the pipeline of future planners
- Roll out a co-ordinated skills and recruitment drive
Not all these 23 action points are new, particularly those under the Efficiency banner, and some actions will take longer than others to have an impact.
In sport, we talk about the marginal gains theory; improving and optimising performance by a small amount across a number of different areas which leads to an overall significant improvement. The Delivery Plan reminds us that everyone involved in planning has a role to play in supporting a national push to deliver more homes.
As Team Scotland Planning, if we can all improve everything we do in the planning system by even a small amount over the next six months as part of the Delivery Plan, that could lead to a significant increase in the delivery of more permanent homes in the right places across Scotland.
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