Local Place Plans
Guidance and tools
Guidance to help your community prepare a Local Place Plan
The following organisations have produced guidance on how to help your community prepare a Local Place Plan:
- Scottish Government guide to preparing, submitting and registering Local Place Plans
- Planning Aid Scotland (PAS) Guide for Community Delivery of Local Place Plans (Overview, Planning and Preparing, Understanding the Issues, and Writing and Delivering)
- Scottish Government and partner organisation guide to Local Place Plans
- Scottish Community Development Centre and Nick Wright Planning How to Guide to creating Local Place Plans
- Historic Environment Scotland Talking About Heritage publication features a section on Local Place Plans.
Tools that may help your community build a Local Place Plan
The following tools may help your community build a Local Place Plan:
- Datasets from Highland Council's Open Map Data Portal are available for use in a mapping tool
- Long term flood hazard and risk mapping (SEPA)
- Community Map Scotland (by Parish Online) mapping tools and advice
- Felt - a tool for making and sharing maps
- Scotland's Towns Partnership tool Understanding Scottish Places
- Scotland's Towns Partnership Toolkit for Successful Town Centres
- Scottish Government and partner organisation Place Standard tool
Existing community-led plans
How do Local Place Plans differ from other ‘community land use plans’?
Local Place Plans, while possibly similar to predecessor ‘community land use plans’, are distinct from them. Local Place Plans have been introduced as a specific plan type by Scottish Government as part of their wider work on planning reform and implementation of the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019.
Local Place Plans must be prepared in line with the legal requirements of paragraphs 1(4) and 2(1) of Schedule 19 of the 1997 Act as amended. This is explained in the Scottish Government’s guide to preparing, submitting, and registering Local Place Plans.
Can an existing community-led plan be submitted as a Local Place Plan?
Ideas for development and the use of land in your local area can be promoted without it being part of a Local Place Plan.
Other (existing or new) community-led plans relating to the Highland Council area, which do not comply with the legal requirements for Local Place Plans, can still be submitted to us as part of the evidence gathering for a Local Development Plan. They can also be taken into account during the preparation of that Local Development Plan.
Alternatively, you may wish to investigate the possibility of converting an existing community-led land use plan into a Local Place Plan. However, you should consider the legal requirements for preparing Local Place Plans.