Tag: survey

City Plan 2030 – Shopping and Leisure

We are continuing our series of topic stakeholder events, where we discuss a key topic to be addressed by City Plan 2030 (such as housing or visitor accommodation) and invite people who work in these areas and are a way of sharing and gaining knowledge in these topics, with our next event on the shopping and leisure sector in Edinburgh. At this seminar we would like to share early findings of our market research in this sector.

This includes the work we already do to keep track of retail floorspace, empty units and types of shops. For example, we conduct a survey of all shop units in the city to look at the health of the retail sector and see how our shopping policies are working.

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All shops are surveyed every five years while the city centre and our 8 town centres are surveyed once a year.

In recent years, there has been a decrease in the number of ‘comparison goods’ shops (where shoppers buy from less often, and will compare prices, features and quality between products and shops before buying) and at the same time an increase in non-retail uses such as hair salons, cafes and restaurants.

The number of vacant units has fallen in recent years, across the city and in most of our town centres. The supplementary guidance we use to set out where and how other uses, such as food and drink, are to be allowed in our centres plays a key role in this by encouraging other uses in the right places to reduce the number of empty units as the shopping and leisure market changes.

We also review our guidance when needed and ask for your views on what kind of uses we should allow and where.

Watch this space for more on our shopping and leisure seminar! In the meantime you can keep track of City Plan 2030 by:

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.

table for blog

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.

Help out with a Swift survey

In Edinburgh we’ve been working since 2000 to help our declining population of swifts.  This summer, in partnership with the RSPB, we are carrying out the first full survey in 10 years to identify where these amazing birds are nesting in the city.  We need as many volunteers as possible to help and the good news is, this is a survey which works best in good weather!

A training event is being held on Wednesday 24th May 6.30pm, hosted by Historic Environment Scotland at the Holyrood Park Education Centre.  So if you fancy a summer’s evening stroll to look for these avian acrobats, please email Amber.Jenkins@rspb.org.uk to book your training place.

For more information on swift conservation work across Edinburgh email us at biodiversity@edinburgh.gov.uk

Edinburgh Local Development Plan Process Online Survey

Hello All,

Following the last blog post about the Edinburgh Local Development Plan, you will know that the Plan has now been adopted. The process to prepare and adopt the Plan was lengthy and complex and included input from thousands of people at a number of stages. To help us find out what worked and what could be improved, we’d like to get your feedback.  So if you were involved in the Plan process or know someone who was, then you can have your say about the project using our online survey.

It’s important to us that we get your feedback as we will use the results to inform how we design and carry out the next plan project. The results of this survey will help us reach  more people in the next project, so that the Plan has more widespread support.

Thank you,

George.