Meeting of the Parliament 11 January 2023
NPF4 is a vitally important document—not for Parliament or Government, but for the communities, local decision makers and businesses that desperately need long-overdue detail about how planning will work for the next decade.
I echo the thanks for the considerable input from stakeholders—especially the communities most affected by the planning framework—that has got us to this point, as well as for the work of the committee clerks, the minister and officials.
Organisations such as the RSPB, Homes for Scotland, Heads of Planning Scotland and Scottish Renewables have welcomed the significant improvements since the first draft. The revised draft delivered necessary improvements to structure and readability, and to the clarity and consistency of policies and the flexibility around them. As we set out at committee, the original draft was not the greatest. The committee concluded that
“there are still elements of NPF4 that could be improved”,
that a cross-Government approach to implementation is still found wanting, and that a decimated planning profession lacks a pipeline to deliver on the ambition in the framework.
We have heard reports that one of our higher education institutes will be ending its undergraduate planning programme, which will leave only a single higher education institute in this country with a planning school. If that comes to pass, that will put even more pressure on the pipeline of planning professionals.
Our most fundamental concern is that the framework does not do enough to tackle Scotland’s housing crisis. The fact is that we need to build more homes, because our housing crisis has got worse since the previous framework, not better.
We need to build more homes that are warmer, safer and more accessible for an ageing, changing population in which people are living alone in greater numbers. That needs to be done while balancing the views of local people and protecting our natural and existing environment.
Homes must be built in greater numbers, because too few have been built for years now. Under the previous Government, an average of about 24,000 homes were built each year by both the private and social sectors. Despite the Government’s ambitious affordable housing supply programme, barely 18,000 new homes a year have been built since the previous framework was introduced.