Executive Decisions

25 Oct 2005

Jim MacKinnon, the Scottish Executive’s chief planner, is developing a radical set of reforms to the Scottish planning system which is intended to deregulate the laws affecting some developments while strengthening controls over developments seen as ‘nationally important’.

These reforms will see council planning officials usurp the role of councillors in deciding applications said to be routine while the Scottish Executive would take on the role of deciding the fate of major developments. Of Scotland’s 52,000 planning applications, 51,500 would be determined by planning officials with some 500 a year going to the Executive. Alf Young of the Herald quizzed MacKinnon at the Scottish Design Show.


Alf Young: Jim, you talk about the difficulty of achieving a balance between efficiency and inclusiveness, we have yet to see the bill but in terms of the consultation so far what is your judgement on the way that balance is going? Are there things that have to be sacrificed to make one or the other better?

Jim MacKinnon: I think the answer to that is that both have to be satisfied but I think that if you want to see them both, then there has to be much better management of the process. I think that’s something that’s not down just now. I mean 12 years to produce a local plan, that’s neither efficient nor inclusive because the people that started off getting involved in the plan get completely scunnered, but if you are doing a plan that takes 12 months, you can be engaged and see an outcome to that…There continues to be some concern in some quarters about community groups and environmental groups in relation to rights of appeal but we have been trying to get over the message that we have got a package here, not a pick and mix approach. And when people say there’s a third party right of appeal in Ireland, and it works, well that is a view, but bear in mind in Ireland politicians don’t make decisions on planning, either from local level or the national level, and whereas a lot of people here think it is very important we have examinations of local plans, in Ireland that doesn’t happen either.
AY: How do you pull together all the strands of development?
JM: I think that the vehicle for doing that is the National Planning Framework because in Scotland we are trying to develop policy on the economy, the environment and society… The first National Planning Framework identified Edinburgh as the area with the biggest potential in Scotland. Looking to the longer term, the area with the biggest potential in my opinion is the east side of Glasgow. If you have got the M74 coming in, the east end is linked to that, if you invest in decontamination of land, housing and a whole range of things, you can look at that as not just a development opportunity for 2008 but for 2015-2020.

AY: Are you intolerant of the view that planning controls hinder development?
JM: think that planning is trying to micro-manage things too much on things like land supply. Let’s be generous. So I’m sympathetic to those developers on things like land release. But I’m unsympathetic to them on questions of design.

AY: How much will fees rise by?
JM: It could be very, very substantial. Calculating fees is very difficult. Some of the figures I have heard south of the Border – we are talking three-figure percentage rises. So we need to look at that very, very carefully. I have no doubt whatsoever that for major applications, for processing that, they will to have to increase but it’s absolutely clear to me as well that if people are paying double, triple, quadruple the amount of fees, they will expect a higher level of service than we get at present… But one of the difficulties that we face and local authorities face is that we are not allowed to ring-fence that money and what we have often seen in local authorities is that money taken away from the planning service and taken into the wider local authority coffers.
AY: How do you decide what criteria will apply to qualify something as a national development and hence processed by the Scottish Executive?
JM: Ok. This is about the hierarchy. What is a national development? And what we have said is that a national development is one you will find in the National Planning Framework. I have seen things where people say now a national development is one where the runway is over 2,500 feet as it were and I just think you get into ludicrous positions there… The issues are about locational specificity and environmental impact.
If it’s not national, and it’s not major, and it’s not removed from the planning system, then everything else is a local development [to be dealt with by council officials in future].

Audience: Councils should have access to design expertise in deciding an application. Why isn’t that the case?
JM: If you are dealing with someone in Regensburg [Germany], in the planning department, he will have a planning qualification but he will be an architect as well. That is something that in practice doesn’t happen in Scotland apart from in the larger cities. If you then get to the situation when you say every local authority should know urban design, or have urban design experience on tap, some of them may not be able to recruit designers and what happens then, do you take away their planning function? You might say you can buy it in. But can you buy it in? We’ve taken the view that we need to improve the design awareness of people working in planning departments – not just with new graduates but with people there and we are working with Architecture and Design Scotland to improve the competencies of people who are there working in development control so that they can have meaningful and equal discussions with architects. That is a big gap in Scotland at the moment. There are too many geographers like me dealing with design issues and I don’t think that’s right and proper.I think we want to get a step-change in that area and move away so there is much more mutual respect rather than people taking what are often subjective stances in debates on applications.

Audience: You need to be careful about raising the fees and not improving the service. There will be a backlash.
JM: I think that’s true. I think there’s a need for a culture change in this context. Planners see paperwork as a virility symbol. ‘If I do a 50-page or 100-page report then I’m doing my job.’ Well, often that detail isn’t needed for decisions. Or they say ‘if we put a lot of conditions on a planning application I’m doing my job’. They might be better with three or four conditions and enforce them.

Audience: I have had experiences with applications that are wholeheartedly recommended for approval and then rejected on grounds that are not valid in planning terms.
JM: One of the powers that we are proposing to take in the bill is to allow investigation of authorities where there is a persistent record of improper decision making… It’s not indicative across Scotland but I am certainly aware of some councils where the credibility of decision making is completely shot, because there is no connection between the recommendations of the development plan and the decisions that are made.