Local Development Plan Progress in Scotland

Aberdeen City Council adopted its Local Development Plan on 29 February 2012. Enterprise, Planning and Infrastructure convener Kate Dean said: "This hugely exciting step is the culmination of three years' hard work which began in 2008 and which involved a huge amount of consultation… a Local Development Plan delivered not just on time, but two months earlier than timetabled and that means it's the first in Scotland to be adopted under the new planning legislation."

The Aberdeen City Council Local Development Plan was received by the Directorate for Planning and Environmental Appeals (DPEA) on 6 May 2011 and four Reporters were appointed to examine 136 issues. The examination process included a comprehensive series of unaccompanied site inspections and, for some issues, additional information was requested from Aberdeen City Council and other parties. DPEA completed their examination and published their report by December 2011.

Circular 1/2009 makes very clear that Scottish Ministers have not tasked Reporters with making local development plans as good as they can be, but with modifying those parts that are clearly inappropriate or insufficient.

In the Chief Reporter’s statement contained in the Directorate for Planning and Environmental Appeals Review of the Year 2010-2011 (the Review), Lindsey Nicoll, Director and Chief Reporter commented on the examination of development plans: "We have also made significant improvements in the time taken to examine development plans, with the majority of reports on development plans being completed in less than 6 months compared with an average period of 70 weeks to submit reports on public local inquiries held under the previous procedures. This is a major contribution to the drive for a genuinely plan led system in which plans are kept up to date and provide a practical and predictable framework for decisions to be made on planning applications."

Of the 6 development plan cases dealt with during the 2010-2011 Review period, 5 were dealt with purely through development plan examinations. Only the Falkirk Local Plan procedures included inquiry sessions and took a significantly longer time to complete. Timescales ranged from 78 weeks for Falkirk Local Plan to only 6 weeks for the Fife Minerals Local Plan. The Review draws attention to an average timescale of 20 weeks for development plan examinations: even if the extremely low figure for the Fife Minerals Plan is excluded, this figure is under 24 weeks and is significantly down from the average of 70 weeks for local plan inquiries held under the previous procedures.

With The Highland Council moving towards adoption of their Highland wide Local Development Plan and the Aberdeenshire Council Local Development Plan expected shortly, it will be interesting to see the contribution these plans make in their areas to a more predictable path in the consenting process.