Hansard

I am pleased to be debating the planning reform agenda so early in the new year. I was delighted to publish “Places, People and Planning: A consultation on the future of the Scottish Planning System” earlier this month. The Scottish Government has made a commitment to bringing forward a planning bill in this parliamentary session. The consultation paper is an important step towards that, and I look forward to the contributions of members of the Scottish Parliament at this early stage. I encourage all members of the public and stakeholders to get involved and respond to the consultation, too.

Planning is important to all of us. It has a big influence on the places where we live, work and play. A strong and efficient planning system can play a key role in attracting investment, supporting us all to lead healthier lives and stimulating economic growth. Planning works with our environmental assets to make development sustainable. It gives people a say in decisions that affect them and can support the health and wellbeing of our communities by creating great places that make it easy to walk, cycle and play.

Our current system has a lot to offer, but there is room for improvement. I want Scotland to have a planning system that can respond to the world that we live in today and anticipate the world that we will live in tomorrow. We have developed our proposals for change to our planning system in a collaborative way. The whole process began with the appointment of an independent panel by the then Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Communities and Pensioners’ Rights, Alex Neil. The panel was asked to provide recommendations for change that reflected the experiences of users of the system, and I welcomed its report when I responded to it last summer.

The panel took an objective look at the planning system, heard evidence from a wide range of people and identified how planning could be improved. Its hard work and common sense were the perfect foundation for us to work from in building a programme of change.

The independent panel did us all a great service by highlighting how the system could be improved. The recommendations were well received by people with an interest in planning, and I was struck by the high level of consensus that emerged in response to the panel’s report.

Since then, we have taken forward an intensive programme of work to explore the panel’s recommendations further. We established six working groups, which gave their time to help us to develop options and proposals for change. Crucially, the groups included people from many different backgrounds and from communities, as well as people from the public and private sectors. That allowed a healthy debate and exchange of views—as with, I have no doubt, the debate that we will have today. The working groups showed that, although people might have different perspectives, they can come together and find common ground on which shared proposals for change can be built.

Our consultation paper is the output from all that work and discussion, and it will be used as we develop the bill. Targeted research, evidence gathering and technical work will continue to be progressed to support our thinking, and that will come together with the outcomes from the consultation to help to identify the need and support for specific proposals for legislative change. I should be clear that the independent panel acknowledged that our planning system is not broken but has so much more potential. It also confirmed that, with some improvements, it can be a system that delivers great places for people across Scotland.

The review was not just about planners debating the details of an already complicated system. The independent panel reminded us that we must not forget the outcomes that we are seeking from changes to the planning system. We want continuing investment in Scotland, we want more high-quality homes to be built, we want infrastructure to support development and we all want to improve the health and quality of life of our communities.

I am confident that planning can help to deliver on those outcomes, but only if it makes things happen and if it works with and not against people. We need a planning system that understands and reflects our needs and aspirations, builds a better future for us all by supporting inclusive growth and improving Scotland’s health, and actively shapes, strengthens and grows our great places. We need a system that is systematically concerned with health and health inequality.

People seem to agree that we need strong and flexible development plans and that we can reduce complexity in the system. People support the delivery of more high-quality homes and recognise that that depends partly on proactive planning of infrastructure to ensure that things are connected and accessible. People recognise the importance of green space to our physical and mental health and to an improved quality of life.

We all recognise that decision making must be efficient and transparent so that we can build certainty and improve public trust in planning. We need planners to show leadership for the future of our built environment and to create great places where people can thrive, and we need to look at smarter resourcing of the system. Above all, I think that there is agreement that it is time to move away from conflict and towards much more positive collaboration with communities. I want planning to be something that is done with people and not to them.

The consultation paper has four key themes. We want to make plans for the future, and aligning community planning and spatial planning will help to ensure that the development plan is recognised and supported across local authorities and by partner organisations.

Planners can be a more active part of regional partnership working. We can remove procedures and reduce duplication by better co-ordinating spatial strategies in the national planning framework. The consultation paper suggests moving from a two-tier system to a single tier of local development plans that are supported, but not dictated, by national policy. Our proposals reflect the need for planning to be flexible so that it can respond to different circumstances around the country, such as the specific challenges and opportunities for island and rural communities, as well as those for the city regions.

There is scope to make local development plans more engaging and easier to use. We can replace confusing main issues reports with clear draft plans. If we remove supplementary guidance, people will be able to find out everything that they need to know from one document. Introducing an early gate check will mean that significant issues are dealt with earlier, rather than in a lengthy examination at the end of the process. Much fuller community and developer involvement and stronger delivery programmes are, in my view, crucial.

It is absolutely true that people must make the system work. I have no doubt that many members receive correspondence on planning matters from their constituents, and that makes it clear to all of us that people care about planning, even if at times they do not like the decisions that are made.

Our package of proposals aims to significantly increase the level of community involvement in the system. Development planning and early engagement are critical. We want communities to make their own plans for their own places and to involve young people more.