Meeting of the Parliament 12 November 2024
That is a valid point. One of the things that struck me in my engagement with planning authorities and the planning ecosystem is the demands on planning resource. That is a consequence of a number of factors. As the system has become, rightly, more complicated and we have more challenges to address—such as climate, flooding, biodiversity and the housing emergency—and as other private sector organisations require more planning resource in the housing space, in energy and in many other aspects of the ecosystem, the supply of planners has not kept pace with the demand. That is why we are addressing the issue.
Adding 30 more planners a year to the total is not an insignificant thing to do. That is one element of what we are doing through the bursary scheme, which is the quickest, most cost-effective way to deliver planners—and I am absolutely open to increasing that further if there is capacity in the system. Very soon, we will bring forward information on the proposal for graduate planners to be employed within the Scottish Government as they go through their courses, in parallel with the bursary scheme. That will add a significant number of additional planners into the pipeline, and that will be targeted to start in the next academic year—in 2025.
In parallel with that, we have identified a need to encourage retired planners to come back and perhaps work part-time, and to identify where those who have left the planning profession mid-career can come back into the system. It is also a matter of identifying roles that can be played in the planning system through digitisation, automation or process improvement, or by individuals who are not fully trained planners. In all those aspects, we are taking forward work that we believe will have a cumulative impact on the resource within the planning system.