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More effort needed if reformed planning system is to work well

By Ian Fraser

The Herald

November 19th, 2007

Local authority planning departments will have to add resources and undergo a major cultural shift if Scotland’s new planning system is to meet its goals of making planning more efficient and more inclusive.

Planning lawyers at law firm DLA Piper also warn that the division of Scottish planning projects into four separate tiers – national developments, major proposals, local developments and minor/permitted developments – is likely to become a bone of contention once new legislation takes effect in November 2008 unless the thresholds between these tiers are clearly delineated.

Civil servants in the Scottish Government are still trying to decide how to define the thresholds between the four categories of project.

The government’s hope is that scrapping a one-size-fits-all approach to planning applications will enable planning departments to devote greater resources to larger and more complex proposals.

Sandy Telfer, national head of DLA Piper’s UK planning and regeneration team, said he is broadly supportive of the new act. “There are a lot of good things in it,” he said.

However, Telfer, who is accredited by the Law Society of Scotland as a specialist in planning law and is a legal associate at the Royal Town Planning Institute, added: “The biggest question is whether local authority planning departments are going to be able to go through the cultural change that’s going to be required for the new system is to work.

“There’s a tension between some of the aims of reform – it is hard to expand public participation in the planning system at the same time as you’re also trying to make the system more efficient.”

He warned that unless local authorities bring in sufficient additional resources into their planning departments, the goal of a faster and more efficient planning system will be missed.

Michael Greig, an associate at DLA Piper who recently joined from MacRoberts, and who was previously an in-house lawyer at Edinburgh and Aberdeen city councils and at Grampian region, said: “I think all sides of the planning system will have to embrace the new planning system in a more positive way than was previously the case.”

Greig added: “One of the major frustrations with the current system has been that people only really begin to get engaged at the point when a planning application is on the table. This makes it difficult for them to have anything other than a knee-jerk response and engenders a sense of frustration.”

He welcomes the fact the new system aims to engage local residents at a much earlier stage in the process – when local authorities are putting together their local development plans.

Greig added the fact that local and structure plans are being phased out and replaced by single-tier local development plans should hasten the process of putting plans together and ensure they are not outdated the minute they are published. However, he pointed out the anomaly that certain areas of the country – such as the cities of Dundee, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow – will still be expected to produce two-tier development plans.

Telfer warned the requirement for city regions to produce two-tier plans incorporating input from several local authorities (for example the Lothians, Fife and the Scottish Borders will be entitled to have an input into the Edinburgh plan) “could give rise to conflict and delay”.

Again, this could undermine the goal of accelerating the process of plan making.

Scotland’s current planning system is based on the Town & Country Planning (Scotland) 1947. In 2001, the Scottish Executive launched a programme of reform and introduced the Planning (Scotland) Bill 2006, which achieved royal assent last December.

In accordance with the act’s four-tiered approach, Scottish ministers are henceforth expected to put together a national planning framework which they will have to review every five years.

In similar style to the “dirigisme” in France, this will give them leeway to designate certain critical developments as “national developments”. Objectors will be unable to question the merits of such projects until after the planning application stage.

The idea is it will make it easier for the government to force through national infrastructure projects along the lines of the M74 extension and the Beauly to Denny electricity cable.

Telfer questioned whether the new system will make developments any more sustainable. “Delivery of sustainable development is entirely dependent on what definition is used for the concept. So far, the concepts have been so woolly as to be fairly meaningless other than as a political gesture.”

In addition to the appointment of Greig from MacRoberts, DLA Piper also recently hired John Watchman, the editor of Scottish Planning and Environmental Law, as a consultant.

Overall in Scotland the law firm, originally known as Dibb Lupton Allsop, employs 148 legal professionals, including 25 partners, and over 133 other staff.

Telfer has been ranked by the Royal Town Planning Institute’s 2007 planning law survey as one of the top three planning solicitors in Scotland. Among other things he is advising Perth & Kinross Council on the negotiation and drafting all of its Section 75 agreements relating to delivering affordable housing through the planning process.

This article published in The Herald on Monday November 19th, 2007

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