What you need to know
The relationship between Local Place Plans & Community-led Action Plans
Like the buses, you wait for a long time for a chance to shape the plans about services and local projects that affect your community and then they all arrive at once. You might have heard about a range of different kinds of local plans that are supposed to give you and your community more control and influence about what happens in the place where you live - sometimes we call this “the planscape”. They might be called locality plans, community regeneration plans, or if they have been produced by your community then they are likely to be called Community Action Plans and be led by local groups on behalf of everyone in your community.
Whatever they are called local plans should seek to:
Have an in-depth conversation with local people about what the area’s needs are;
Provide ideas and evidence for communities to seek funding to develop their own projects and services;
Improve local public services but bring them closer to communities and involve local people in how they are planned, delivered and evaluated.
This briefing is designed to:
Provide brief explanations of different types of plans in the planscape;
Explore the best way to connect community-led plans i.e. CAPs and LPPs;
Better connect ideas and proposals about the use of land and buildings with the wider needs of the community
Here is a brief summary of what it’s helpful to know about these different plans:
Initially, the planning authority will ensure that any submitted LPPs meet the requirements of the Act, but the content or proposals are not reviewed until a later stage.
A comparison guide
| Type of plan | Advantages | Considerations |
|---|---|---|
| Community Led Action Plan (CAP) | Led entirely by communities, you involve local people your way, agree the content and what the priorities are. This can cover all the issues that matter to your community. Great for gathering evidence to lobby service providers for better services and for funding bids. | Although government and most community planning partners like councils recognise CAPs as valuable, they don’t have a basis in law at this point. You may need to persuade public services (and the private sector, where appropriate) to support your plan and help deliver some of its aims by investing their time and money in it. |
| Local Place Plan | There is a legal right to make a Local Place Plan, so planning authorities have to take it seriously when creating their next Local Development Plan. It is a very useful way of thinking about land, vacant spaces and buildings and how they can be used for good in your community. | Local Place Plans have, legally, to focus on land and buildings, although there is nothing to stop them including your community’s needs more broadly. Only the parts of the plan that relate to planning policy must be taken into account by local authorities, other sections have no more legal status than a community led action plan. There are also some basic requirements that communities must comply with to ensure that their LPP is registered and taken into account by the local planning authority. Initially, the planning authority will ensure that any submitted LPPs meet the requirements of the Act, but the proposals are not reviewed until a later stage. |
| Locality Plan | Community Planning partners have a duty to produce locality plans under the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act (2015). These are produced by the community planning partnership and, although communities must be involved in this process, they are not community controlled. They should have 1yr, 3yr and 10-year plans on how to tackle issues affecting areas of greater disadvantage. | Although there should be extensive engagement it often doesn’t happen. The plan is generally owned by the community planning partnership rather than the community and following consultation where communities are asked what their issues are, CPPs usually decide what will or won’t be included in the plan. In some areas, communities have felt very distant from the process. Some communities are disappointed about the extent to which they can influence these plans and SCDC have called for the statutory guidance covering them to strengthened. |
| Other service plans e.g. Children’s Services Plans | Plans like these are usually thematic – they allow services (sometimes involving partners) to focus in on a particular area of work or issue e.g. criminal justice, children’s services, health and social care. There can be a statutory duty to consult with the people who use the service when public bodies create or update these plans. | How these plans fit in with other wider plans can vary. Since the plans mainly focus on people who the service directly works with, wider community views on the issue are often missed e.g. a drug and alcohol service plan may consult with the users of addiction services and families affected by drugs and alcohol but will not normally undertake a wide community consultation. |
| Other plans and policies i.e. Local Development Plan, The National Planning Framework (NPF4) | NPF4 sets out planning policy at a national level – what councils or national parks should be working towards. The Local Development Plan sets out the council or national park’s planning policy for their area. You should show how the proposals you set out in your LPP fits in with these. | It can be difficult to understand and navigate public sector plans and groups might benefit from some support to match their proposals to the relevant policies these plans set out. |
Having as much control and influence as possible
Your community will achieve more if you can successfully balance community control of the content of plans about your area, with commitments from public agencies and other partners to work with you to make positive changes to services and address local issues. The Place Principle is an agreement between the Scottish Government and Local Authorities to work toward a coordinated approach based on local community views and needs in local communities. It is designed to encourage partners in the public and private sectors, the third sector and communities, to agree a clear vision for their place and collaborate to improve local services for people and communities.
We think the best way to achieve this is for communities to produce community-led action plans based on the best possible community engagement, and to think about the “spatial” and other land use issues as part of that process. You can then seek to have your CAP recognised as the LPP for the area and also use it to shape your arguments for inclusion of local themes and issues in other service plans. If you have produced an LPP first, then we suggest developing your CAP by building on this. What matters is that communities control the content of what they think matters and do not have to depend solely on the others to validate their ideas
SCDC have also suggested that CAPs should have a basis in law in future as part of our proposals for Scotland’s local governance review.