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Follow up Response on 31 August session with Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Economy - 21 September 2021

Letter from Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Economy to Convener - 21 September 2021

Dear Ariane,

Thank you for your letter of 9 September requesting further information on a number of planning matters that were not covered during my appearance at Committee on 31 August 2021. I have provided some answers to the committee’s questions below.

20 Minute Neighbourhoods

As set out in the Programme for Government for the next year and over the course of this Parliament, we will deliver on our vision for 20 Minute Neighbourhoods across Scotland. Living well locally is a key objective with places where people can have their needs met within a 20-minute walk from their homes, reducing emissions and encouraging active travel. 20 minute neighbourhoods can be applied across a variety of settlement scales and types from urban environments to rural and island communities. The upcoming National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4) will support 20 minute neighbourhoods enabling our places to be planned and developed in a way that reduces the need to travel to services and amenities. This will also play an important role in supporting our net zero ambitions, including our target to reduce car kilometres by 20% by 2030.

We have now established the Place-Based Investment Programme which is being backed with an initial £325 million capital over the next five years, and which builds on the successful impact of the Regeneration Capital Grant Fund and Town Centre Action Plan. The programme will ensure investments are shaped by the needs and aspirations of local communities and accelerate our ambitions for 20 minute neighbourhoods, town centre action, community led regeneration and tackling disadvantage.

Complementing this, we are also now rolling out our new £50 million low carbon Vacant & Derelict Land Investment Programme over the next five years, supporting ambitious local approaches to unblocking the reuse of persistent vacant and derelict land to deliver new green infrastructure, supporting just transition to net zero.

Key to the resilience of communities has been the action taken by communities themselves. We will continue to build on this to ensure that resilience can be sustained as part of our recovery and renewal through continuing support from our Empowering Communities Programme.

Local Place Plans

First of all, I should clarify that there is no requirement for communities to prepare a Local Place Plan (LPP), but it presents a very good opportunity for them to express their aspirations and influence the future of their local places. Many communities have already been actively involved in shaping the places they stay through the preparation of community-led plans.

While LPPs will be community-led, we expect there to be some collaboration with the public sector, particularly the planning authority. As an example, section 15A of the amended Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997 (the 1997 Act) will require a planning authority to publish an invitation to local communities to prepare local place plans and to provide information on the assistance available for local communities to prepare LPPs.

It will be for communities to consider the scope of the issues that that they wish to address. However, we see LPPs supporting community aspirations on the big challenges for a future Scotland such as responding to the global climate emergency and tackling inequalities. Planning authorities will be required to take into account all registered local place plans in their areas when producing local development plans. By influencing local planning policies, communities will help to shape the future development of their places.

The Scottish Government consulted earlier this year on proposals for the detailed arrangements for preparation, submission and registration of LPPs. The regulations will be laid in the Scottish Parliament later in the autumn. Communities will be supported to develop LPPs through associated guidance, including a ‘How To’ Guide that will help communities to understand and follow the process.

Some communities are preparing community-led plans in advance of the LPP provisions being in place with funding secured from a range of organisations and sources such as the public sector, both central and local government, and through grants from projects such as Awards for All. We anticipate that this will continue. Communities in Wester Hailes, City of Edinburgh and Foxbar in Renfrewshire for example, have benefitted from local authorities being supportive in areas which have multiple issues of deprivation.

National Planning Framework 4 and Planning Policies

Our work is progressing well on Scotland’s Fourth National Planning Framework (NPF4). In November 2020 we published a Position Statement setting out our thinking on the direction of travel. Since then we have been drafting the NPF4, taking into account the consultation responses to the Position Statement, and working collaboratively with local authorities and other partners on indicative regional spatial strategies to inform the spatial strategy. Later this autumn we will lay a draft NPF4 in the Scottish Parliament. Alongside Parliamentary scrutiny, we will publicly consult on the draft and carry out extensive public engagement.

The draft NPF4 will include a list of proposed national developments that will help to deliver the spatial strategy. The criteria for analysing national developments was published in January 2020 as part of our Call for Ideas early engagement programme. The four criteria are: reducing emissions; supporting health, wellbeing, sustainability and quality of life of our population; reducing poverty and inequality through sustainable economic growth; and protecting or enhancing quality of place. We will be inviting comment on the proposed national developments as part of our engagement programme and are currently considering the most appropriate ways to involve a wider variety of stakeholders.

Once approved, the NPF4 will be part of the statutory development plan and its content will be applied in the preparation of local development plans, local place plans, masterplans and briefs and for determining the range of planning consents. The policies contained within NPF4 will work collectively as a package to deliver the strategy. Authorities selected as pilot Regional Land Use Partnerships have closely aligned with groupings that have been developing indicative Regional Spatial Strategies to inform options for the national spatial strategy.

Yours sincerely,

KATE FORBES