Scotland’s planning minister is calling for local councils to keep up the good work when into comes to making planning decisions.

Scottish Government planning minister, Alex Neil says that while major developments are being processed faster than last year, it’s important that the planning system remains effective.

He says that Scotland needs to increase new developments and invest in modern infrastructure.

John Wright, Planning & Development Surveyor at Strutt & Parker in Perth, said: “I agree that Local Authority performance needs to continue to improve to support ever increasing application fees, and needs to be measured against something.  However, I am less concerned about the speed of decision making and more concerned about the quality of the decision making.

I would rather work with the Council for a bit longer to resolve issues that arise during the process, than find I have received a refusal simply because I was unable to submit a specific piece of supporting information and the target decision date was approaching.”

Highest rate ever

New Scottish Government figures show that there were 1,528 decisions made on local housing developments during July to September of 2014/15, the highest quarterly figure over the past two and a half years.

The average time taken to process major developments and local developments is also lower than last year.

The average decision time for local housing developments was 14.3 weeks, which is over one week faster than the previous quarter’s average of 15.4 weeks.

It is also the quickest average decision time over the past two and a half years.

The average decision time for the 61 major developments was 33.5 weeks. While this is higher than the previous quarter’s results, it is an improvement of almost four days compared to the same period last year (34.1 weeks) and better by almost 12 days when compared to the same period in 2012/13 (35.2 weeks).

In the second quarter of 2014, there were six major business and industry developments approved. 

These had an average decision time of 17.9 weeks, which is more than 11 and a half weeks quicker than the 10 developments in the previous quarter (29.4 weeks) and an improvement of over 18 weeks on the same period in 2012/13.

Building a reputation

Mr Neil wants to enhance the reputation of Scotland’s planning service by speeding up momentum on planning performance and driving further improvement.

He says that planning should be about getting the right developments in the right place.

The consistently high approval rate of new development shows the councils are working closely with applicants to meet that aim, he adds.

Inconsistency

Mr Neil suggests that there is some inconsistency across the country and raises concerns that some councils with longer timescales are impacting on the averages.

He has written to every planning authority to give his comments on all aspects of their performance in the last year, and has vowed to continue to monitor the planning statistics closely.