Past community-led plans and training delivered by or supported by Paul include support for rural and urban communities consisting of the full scope of local demographics, across the whole of Scotland.
Soon there will be a dedicated Scottish Government Review of the impact that this shift might represent. This is part 1 of several blogs about the forthcoming Local Place Plan Review from the Scottish Government.
What’s been you’re experience of Local Place Plans so far?
• as a community leader preparing or leading their production?
• as a local authority planner implementing the guidance and Circular, registering them and possibly even beginning to assess them?
• as a consultant supporting communities to prepare them?
• as a representative of the development sector as you engage with them?
A radical shift
Local Place Planning is the single most significant shift towards an endorsement of radical planning in Scotland since 1947. By radical I personally don’t mean “insurgent” or “combative” but rather “led from the roots” aka “community-led” (the words radical and radishes share the same etymology). Some may decry that the structural shift they represent has not gone far enough. But a door has nevertheless been opened, and in doing so the Government has enshrined in law the idea that only a properly constituted Community Body can initiate and articulate the spatial vision these documents convey.
Soon there will be a dedicated Scottish Government Review of the impact that this shift might represent. The National Planning Framework 4 – Delivery Programme (v4) indicated back in January 2026 that:
“We will be monitoring and evaluating the extent to which local place plans (LPPs) are informing local development plans and planning decisions. Ministers are required to report on LPPs soon after July 2026 and we will embark on the review in the second half of the year. The report will include: numbers of LPPs submitted and registered, details of support given to communities to prepare LPPs, an assessment of how they have been influencing local development plans and decisions on planning applications, their overall effectiveness, and whether further support should be provided to community bodies.”
This paragraph is essentially a restatement of Section 15B (2) Review of local place plans in the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019.
A caveat
There is a big caveat though. At this stage it’s going to be hard to come to a definitive conclusion as to their overall effectiveness. While we may be able to do an early assessment of the impact of LPPs (or not) on Development Management decisions (such as this one), it will be too early in the cycle to do a meaningful review of their impact on Development Planning decisions. This is because as yet no new-style Proposed Plan has been laid before committee. Which means that we have no evidence of how LPP proposals have been assessed for inclusion or not in LDPs. And no communication to communities as to why those choices have or haven’t been made.
Some initial thoughts
In terms of “details of support given to communities to prepare LPPs” my expectation is that the only consistency we will find across Authorities will be inconsistency. From the significant support given in the Borders and D&G to communities to prepare place plans through the Borderlands Regional Deal, to the support to create ‘spatial CAPs’ (not LPPs) in the Cairngorms, to the mentoring and training programs offered in Fife and Shetland, to the £10K-15K funding pots offered in Renfrewshire and Glasgow, and the bare minimum support offered in other areas, there has been huge variation across the country.
Assessing “whether further support should be provided to community bodies” may be tricky in the sense that the answer to this question was always going to be ‘yes’, even at the time the legislation was written. This is because no dedicated funding support for LPP production has been offered by the Scottish Government in the interim: the old dedicated Making Places Initiative or MPI was amalgamated with the Investing in Community Fund in 2018/19, which in turn was massively over-subscribed and very rarely if ever distributed money for LPPs. Tricky therefore in the sense that with the answer still being ‘yes’, the knotty question of what support the Government will therefore recommend remains.
Last, it will be very interesting to have a snap-shot of how many LPPs have been prepared across Scotland by the second half of 2026. My instinct is that the uncorking of energy LPPs have enabled is pretty significant (particularly among Community Councils who finally have a positive, proactive vehicle to express their planning vision). Having this quantified will help us to celebrate this. And also reveal quite how much work has been done from the grassroots that will be invaluable to Local Authorities.
What would you recommend?
What else might come out of the review? It’s not clear as yet whether or how views may be gathered or whether the scope will be wider than just the questions given in the 2019 Act. But a review of their “overall effectiveness” may provide scope for an expanded opportunity for interested parties to offer other insights and recommendations.
In second part of this blog I’ll offer up some of my own thoughts for what I’d like to see changed.
This is part 1 of several blogs about the forthcoming Local Place Plan Review from the Scottish Government. Read part 2 here.
