Investing in Planning: a consultation on resourcing Scotland’s planning system

Enabling access to specialists to support planners when making decisions sounds valuable. Subjects specialists could provide detailed knowledge about could include expected carbon emissions from the lifecycle of a proposed development and appropriate measures for biodiversity enhancement for a proposed site. We have said partially agree as a planning hub alone won’t deliver improvement in the system.

Planning is a valuable public service and the decisions planners make affect the quality of the built and natural environment, which affects human wellbeing and the quality of peoples' lives. We support increasing planning fees and perhaps a percentage of the increased fees could be ring fenced to support a Planning Hub.

Planning is a valuable public service and at present it seems to be under strain. The skills and expertise within planning authorities should be recognised and invested in. Everyone stands to benefit as a result. Increasing fees annually in line with inflation seems reasonable, proportionate and arguably the minimum that should be done to invest in this public service. We suggest increased fees are ring-fenced so these are spent against the planning authority services and do not disappear into the public authority bottom line.

We suggest regular reviews on planning fees to check whether the increase in fees is making a substantive difference and whether the fees need to be adjusted. We support Planning Authorities being able to introduce discretionary fees where there is a justification to do so.

Applications that have been refused and are re-submitted with slightly revised design should incur a penalty fee. Repeat applications can make a mockery of the decision-making process, wasting time and public resources and exhausting community resources also (communities have to find the time, energy and resource to run repeated campaigns against unwanted development in their local area).

Appeals absorb a lot of public service staff time and energy in addition to community time and energy. This should be costed for and introducing a fee system is a way to do this.

Setting the fee as a percentage seems fair, aids transparency and certainty and proportionate to the original planning application fee.

The percentage for the fee needs to make a significant contribution towards the public resourcing costs of an appeal (this could include the costs incurred by community groups that want to participate in an appeal process).

If local stakeholders would find it easier to engage with the planning process for large scale electricity generation applications if local planning authorities had the power to determine them then that would be a reason to adjust the threshold. However, the additional workload placed on local planning authorities would need to be funded and resourced adequately.

Rosemary Simpson

John Muir Trust