Tag: plan

City Plan 2030 – Timetable Update

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As we mentioned in our last post of 2018, we’re now looking at revising the City Plan 2030 project timetable.  We’re making these changes as we don’t want to ask for your view on the choices for City Plan until we know what is in another plan – the second Strategic Development Plan for South East Scotland.

The Strategic Development Plan is currently with Scottish Ministers.  It hasn’t been approved yet, so we’re changing the project timetable.  This means:

  • We will not report the Choices for City Plan 2030 (the main issues report) in January 2019.
  • We won’t be carrying out the main consultation from February to April 2019.
  • The events set out in our current Development Plan Scheme (from September 2018) will be moved to later in 2019.
  • The timing of the next stages in the City Plan 2030 project will be affected.

We still hope to carry out the main consultation in the first half of 2019 and will announce the dates of the new consultation period in the next couple of months (e.g. February or March).  We will publish a new Development Plan Scheme with rescheduled consultation dates and events then too.

Until then, we will use this time to gather and build on our evidence and studies for Choices for City Plan and hold further engagement events in local places around the city.

In the meantime, watch this space and keep up to date with the project by:

The Edinburgh Local Development Plan Turns One!

We officially started using our current Local Development Plan (LDP) on the 24th of November 2016. This means that this time last week, our LDP turned one!

In celebration, we thought we would write a brief blog post to share with you five things we have achieved in the first year of our LDP.its my birthday

  1. The LDP allocated almost 700 hectares of additional land for housing. This land could accommodate up to 10,000 new homes, meaning that we’ve now identified enough land in the city for over 31,000 houses.
  2. Of the newly allocated land, sites that could provide over 3,000 homes are already under construction and an additional 1,000 units have received planning consent.
  3. We adopted five Supplementary Guidance documents covering the City Centre Retail Core and the Tollcross, Corstorphine, Leith and Bruntsfield & Morningside Town Centres.
  4. We updated two planning guidelines – the Edinburgh Design Guidance and Development in the Countryside and Green Belt.
  5. We carried out our first feedback survey that asked you how effectively you’d been involved in the creation of the LDP. We look forward to engaging with you more as we move towards our next LDP, LDP 2.

Sign up to our blog mailing list for more exciting LDP updates!

Housing Land Audit and Delivery Programme 2017

The Supply of Land

The Council use something called the Housing Land Audit and Delivery Programme (HLADP) to assess the supply of effective land for housing in Edinburgh.

What is effective land?

Effective land must be free of any constraints that could prevent the building of homes. These constraints can include:

  • who owns the land;
  • contamination;
  • how easily the land can be sold;
  • infrastructure (including roads and schools for example) and;
  • how the land is currently used or has been used in the past.

The Strategic Development Plan for South East Scotland sets out how many new homes the city needs. This figure is currently 20,222 to be built by 2026.

Our latest housing land assessment in October was the 2017 HLADP. We have identified effective land for 23,329 houses on a mix of both brownfield (55%) and greenfield (45%) sites.

Sites included in the 2017 HLADP are in the Local Development Plan or have planning permission.

HLADP MAP

The Delivery of Homes

The HLADP examines the supply of land and the expected delivery of new homes.

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The output target is a five-year segment of the housing land supply target. The delivery programme is the number of homes likely to be built over the next five-years. We calculate this figure in agreement with Homes for Scotland.

Accelerating Delivery Rates

Many factors, including the strength of the economy and the demand for housing, can affect the construction of new homes. Even if we have enough land, it won’t always mean that houses will be built.

The credit crunch has affected the construction of housing in recent years. Although the country is still recovering from this, completions have doubled in the last four years. Current build rates in the city are steadily growing.

We are working to find ways to further speed up build rates in the city. The diagram below highlights some of the factors we have identified.

HLADP table

What’s next for the HLADP?

We will be using the HLADP to update our next Local Development Plan Action Programme. We’re also doing work to identify potential interventions to increase the delivery of housing. That will be reported next year.

Look out for our next blog post about a housing site currently under construction in the city.

 

Local Development Plan Update: Our New Development Plan Scheme

After the Local Development Plan (LDP) was published, we asked you for your feedback on how well you had been involved.  The results of this survey can be viewed here.

The Development Plan Scheme

The newest Development Plan Scheme was approved on the 7 September 2017. Every Development Plan Scheme has a Participation Statement. This sets out how we will engage with the public as we get ready to prepare for the next LDP.

The planning system can impact everyone. So, it is important that all members of the public, community groups and organisations have their say about what’s in a LDP.

Thomas Morton Hall 18 Jan 2012 2 (002)
Engagement Workshop we held for our current LDP at Thomas Morton Hall in January 2012.

Improving Engagement

This year, we have considered the feedback we received from the LDP engagement survey when writing our Participation Statement.

Following the public’s comments, we are now working towards raising better awareness of the LDP process and improving the opportunities for you to get involved with creating the Plan.

To kick things off, we are:

1) Writing a communication plan.

69 people responded to our consultation survey. We found that the majority were over 65 and retired.

As result, we now know we must find better ways to:

2) Engage with the 16 – 54 age group.

47/69 respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement that “I think that the Edinburgh Local Development Plan process was good“.

Because of this, we are working to understand:

3) Better ways to involve all community groups in the creation of our next LDP;

4) Your preferred method and frequency of update from us; and

5) How we can make it easier for you to comment on proposals and let you know how we use your comments.

What happens next?

We will keep you updated with the work we are doing to deliver the first LDP with a frequent series of blog posts.

Moving forward, these will begin to touch on preparing the next LDP – LDP 2.

A new Development Plan Scheme will be published in 2018 and will include details and dates of engagement activities that you can get involved in.

#SYPC2017

I have titled this post with a hashtag, as we were asked to promo the event on social media.

Emma’s blog post #4: #SYPC2017

SYPC stands for Scottish Young Planners Conference. The conference consisted of morning lectures with Q&A sessions, and afternoon workshops (and then drinks after). The whole day was geared around giving young planners the skills they need to be successful.

The first talk was given by Kevin Stewart MSP, titled “People, Places and Planning: skills and the planning review”. The Q&A for this was particularly good, as it gave us the chance to question the Minister on the planning review, and future prospects for planning in Scotland.

There’s a picture of the Minister that I took and put on the planning Edinburgh insta which you should all be following.

By the way, the most used buzzword was “collaboration” (we guess. We didn’t keep a tally or anything). Coincidentally, “collaboration” is the very word Bob Reid (former convenor of RTPI Scotland) said we should replace with “mobilisation”. Bob’s talk was all about “collaborating: working together to deliver development”, and he says there’s no point in talking about things if you’re not getting anything done; collaboration v mobilisation.

Nicola Barclay, CEO of Homes for Scotland gave a talk on “leading”. She spoke about her journey to the role she’s in now, and what helped shape her into the leader she is today. She recommended we all do a quiz (something like this) to see what positive traits we have that we might not recognise on our own. Very inspirational stuff, loved it.

I attended 2 of the afternoon workshops;

“Making development work: the economics of development”, given by Catherine Wood (Gladman) and Ian Drummond (Taylor Wimpey).

Despite this being largely maths based, the process of valuing land was explained to us in a way we (most of us, anyway) could understand…. That toss up between giving better designed places or maximising profit. Toughy.

Also “make yourself an asset: effective networking and business development”, from Sandra Lindsay (Springfield Properties) and Michael Halliday (Halliday Fraser Munro).

This, I could totally get on board with. We learnt how to do an “elevator pitch”, which was effectively me selling myself to a stranger in 1 minute without coming across as a weirdo… I’ll have to keep you posted on how I manage with that…

To conclude: the information provided was very good, we all learned a lot throughout the day, and I didn’t lose a bet about “vision” being the most used buzzword.

Emma

Ps. It took a solid 24 minutes for Donald Trump to be mentioned, and he was subsequently mentioned maybe 3 further times;

“Do not leave the wrong impression” – we were learning about how to effectively network, here