Planning for growth: Scotland

No amount of process reform compensates for a service without the people to do the work. Planning is the lowest-funded local authority service in Scotland, with expenditure down 28.6% in real terms since 2010/11, and around 150 planners graduate each year against an estimated need for some 700 over the next ten to fifteen years.

• Ringfence planning fees so revenue from applications goes back into planning services, and build predictable funding into every spending review settlement
• Take a more holistic look at how planners may operate between local authorities. Solve the planner shortage for the long term through new entry routes, apprenticeships, and targeted attraction of expertise from outwith Scotland
• Give planning hubs the resource and mandate to deploy experienced specialists onto complex applications in offshore wind, hydrogen, CCUS, floating wind and data centres.

Documentation, validation and consultation requirements have added cost and delay without adding value, and some guidance is more than thirty years old. The priority now is to make the existing system work better.

• Strip back disproportionate requirements and update guidance that is no longer fit for purpose, with clearer direction for statutory consultees so NPF4 is applied consistently across all 34 authorities
• Set statutory timescales, using the powers in the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 for Section 36 and 37 energy consents, and target decisions on Public Local Inquiries within twelve months
• Reform clock-stopping so information requests come upfront, and coordinate consents through a single gateway backed by a Major Projects Office owning end-to-end delivery of large-scale infrastructure
• Work with business and investors to ensure the role and remit of the Major Projects Office is right.

Scotland's net zero and digital ambitions depend on a consenting regime that can match the scale and pace of what needs to be built.

• Fix marine and energy consenting: adopt the updated Sectoral Marine Plan for Offshore Wind, fund the Scottish Marine Recovery Fund, determine wayleaves and compulsory purchase orders within 52 weeks, and expedite transmission and grid connections with UK Government, NESO and Ofgem
• Get ahead of floating offshore wind by developing a clear consenting framework for wet storage and staging before applications arrive in volume, given that around 60% of Scotland's wind resource sits in water too deep for fixed foundations
• Keep the digital pipeline open with proportionate national guidance separating hyperscale from smaller-scale data centres, planning for their grid demand rather than treating it as a surprise. The Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone alone is expected to draw £8.2 billion of private investment and support more than 3,400 high-value jobs
• Treat housing as economic infrastructure, setting a national target of at least 25,000 new homes a year and reporting against it publicly.

Scotland's planning function is too fragmented to work well as it stands, and national guidance is too often treated as optional. The fix is to make the existing structure behave as a more coherent whole.

• Establish shared services and lead-authority arrangements for the most complex applications, with a single gateway across land-based planning, the Energy Consents Unit and marine consenting
• Create a national Planning Performance Framework reporting annually on decision times, approval rates, backlogs and delivery, with consequences for persistent underperformance and recognition for leading authorities
• Lead a single, nationally funded technology programme rather than 34 separate strategies, using AI to lift routine work off planners and backing a National Digital Planning Champion.