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.
Not every Social Enterprise is a CIC or a SCIO. It’s not the governance model but the ethos that counts: a commitment to recycling the abundance that comes our way back into the community is at the heart of it all.
It’s a pleasure therefore to have been taken on as consultant by Kinning Park Complex (KPC) to work on their Because We Say So! Plan. The goal is to finally get it validated and on the public register at Glasgow City Council. Pro bono, no nonsense, after a proactive contact resulted in support from the KPC Board and CEO Bruce McDowell. We need to make sure that no place gets left behind in Local Place Plan production…for want of capacity or any other reason.
Some backstory
The most recent iteration of the ‘Because We Say So!’ Plan dates back to March 2022, when it was submitted for validation but not accepted. Despite GCC approaching KPC in 2025 to follow up, unfortunately no progress had been made. Staffing shortages, loss of organisational memory and other priorities meant the plan was in limbo (at least in spatial planning terms).
I first was involved in ‘Because We Say So!’ back in 2021 after joining Planning Aid Scotland and leading on the first year of their Sustaining Choices initiative. This was designed to support communities across Scotland to develop Active Travel and Sustainable Transport plans. Kinning Park, who were moving forward on producing a Local Plan, jumped at the chance for some additional support.
In the midst of Covid, I helped their team to develop skills in online consultation workshops so they could develop an Active Travel plan. This developed their skills to confidently use online sessions to later work on the wider LPP. Planning Aid Scotland is listed as a partner in the plan, and the outputs of Sustaining Choices can be found in the Active Travel section of the LPP report.
Research with Glasgow Uni into the experiences of community leaders developing LPPs
Fast forward to earlier this year and I found out from Andy Inch, Professor of Planning at Glasgow University that the ‘Because We Say So!’ Plan hadn’t yet been validated. This was news to me! Not least because it had been the subject of a piece of work by Community Land Scotland designed to help communities create their own LPPs.
I’d been helping Andy deliver an innovative new course on planning and participation in which students were given the task of designing and delivering some participatory research into community experiences of LPP production. I’d given a lecture on LPP theory and production to which Frankie Frankgate (one of the KPC staff who wrote the original Because We Say So plan) was also due to attend. In the end he couldn’t make it, but I did find out the fate of the LPP itself.
Andy and I agreed it was such a loss to have got that far in production only to fall short for want of complying with the necessaries. So, I got in touch with Bruce. Despite being set up as a sole trader, I want to practice as a social enterprise and recycle my knowledge and earnings back into supporting communities with more marginalised, urban demographics. Here was an ideal opportunity.
What its going to take
We’ll need to convert the plan’s projects into proposals, write some planning statements to take into account the necessary wider plans, supply evidence of KPC being a valid Community Body, collate a Statement of Community Support, do a simple boundary map and run the statutory information period. But hopefully in the next couple of months the plan will be validated in time for assessment and inclusion of proposals in the forthcoming Glasgow Proposed Plan. Big thanks to GCC planning for their support so far.
Watch this space!
