Dr Caroline Brown is the Director for Scotland, Ireland and English Regions
At the beginning of the year I said that there were interesting things happening in Scottish Planning, and some of those things are now starting to come into focus following the publication of this year’s Programme for Government. In it, the Scottish Government outlines their intention to create a new Planning Hub – one of three new measures on planning.
The hub’s not a completely new idea and was first discussed in a workshop at Victoria Quay in November 2023. At that point, folks were looking at the Scottish Building Services Hub (then a pilot, now permanent) and asking whether that was a useful model that could be used in planning to support local authorities and provide access to technical expertise.
A further iteration of the hub idea was presented in the consultation on Investing in Planning earlier this year, although details about the Hub’s purpose and how it would operate were still very fluid. RTPI Scotland’s response to the consultation noted our broad support for the idea of a planning hub and recognised the potential for this to support the work of local authorities, particularly for smaller authorities where in-house expertise is limited. However, we also pointed out that there was a mixed response to the idea from our members, with a key concern being the possibility that it would require additional planning staff and thus worsen employment pressures across the sector, creating new bottlenecks. Questions of funding were also much discussed, with some worry that stretched planning budgets at central and local government would be stretched even thinner to cover the set up and maintenance of this new asset. No one was very keen on that.
Last week we learned that the Planning Hub will focus initially on hydrogen, while subsequent phases will cover other topics including housing and renewables. This week we’ll hear more detail about how the Hub will work. It’s early days obviously, but those details look promising for several reasons.
First, additionality. Funding for the pilot hydrogen phase is coming from a budget external to planning, so it will bring extra resource into the system and wont require any squeezing of existing budgets. That’s a really big win, and will help to assuage any budget jitters at the local authority level.
Second, related to that additionality test, the hub is going to focus on providing technical help and expertise, not planning expertise. That means it wont be employing planners – but rather will be levering in experts in hydrogen to support the work of planning authorities. That’s another of those big concerns about attracting scarce planning staff dealt with.
Third, the initial focus on hydrogen is a helpful way to proceed, even if that’s not where the biggest pressures are at the moment. Hydrogen is quite a defined technical area, which means the scope of the pilot phase will be easier to cover. And, because it’s a new area for planning applications, not all authorities are working on or thinking about hydrogen – so the Hub will not be under pressure from every Scottish planning authority on Day 1. It makes sense to start narrow and then scale up.
Finally, setting up the Planning Hub as a proof of concept pilot with a short timeframe is a good way to test, break and improve the idea. The researcher in me is keen that the pilot is set up with a clear idea about what we expect it to deliver in the short, medium and long-term – but we cant wait for the long-term impacts to be known before we proceed to the next step. Something about moving fast and breaking things springs to mind – but I’m hopeful that Scotland’s Planning Hub 1.0 will be a useful experiment. Worth watching I think.
Related reading
Craig McLaren, National Planning Improvement Champion, discusses the new National Planning Improvement Hub in this blog.
