Local Place Plans

Invitation to prepare a Local Place Plan

East Ayrshire Council is inviting its communities to prepare Local Place Plans. As per Section 15A of the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997 (as amended), all community bodies have an opportunity to prepare a Local Place Plan, giving communities the chance to feed into the planning system with proposals for the development and use of land and buildings.

What is a Local Place Plan?

The Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 introduced a statutory right for community bodies to produce their own Local Place Plans.

The Purpose of a Local Place Plan is to express the local community’s aspirations and priorities with regards to the development and use of land.

For example, a Local Place Plan can be used to identify:

• 🏰 Places or buildings which the community values and wishes to protect
• 🏡 Sites where the community would welcome the development of new housing or community facilities
• 🏫 Improvements for town, village, or neighbourhood centres
• 🌱 Sites for community projects such as food growing, community gardens, or recreational space
• 🌳 Proposals to tackle climate change, such as renewable energy, flood risk management and tree planting
• 🚲 Initiatives to improve and promote active travel

… and many other land use issues, depending on what is important to your community!

Who can produce a Local Place Plan?

To produce a Local Place Plan, your organisation needs to be a community body or a Community Council.

How are Local Place Plans different from Community Action Plans?

In East Ayrshire, the Council has for many years, worked alongside communities to produce both placemaking plans and community action plans. We know many communities are already working on Community Action Plans, with support from our Vibrant Communities teams. The process for producing a Local Place Plan may therefore seem familiar. So, what is different about Local Place Plans?

Well,

• A local place plan must have a focus on the development and use of land. In most instances, Community Action Plans focus on a far wider range of community priorities, such as litter management, promotion of events, environmental improvements, or improvements to public transport timetables.
• If a Local Place Plan meets the criteria to be registered by the Council, it will be considered when the next Local Development Plan is being produced, giving community views more weight in the planning process.

Local Place Plans can be part of a wider Community Action Plan or can sit alongside a Community Action Plan. Or your community may decide that it produces either a LPP or Community Action Plan. It is up to you as the community to decide what type of Plan is right for you and how you want to go about producing your plan.

You may wish to contact your local Vibrant Community worker to discuss this further:

Email: vibrantcommunities@east-ayrshire.gov.uk

Council Support and Getting Started

Local Place Plans are a community-led process, but the Council can provide support and advice to help in their development and delivery. Should you have any queries or require support you can request this via:

Email address: LocalDevelopmentPlans@east-ayrshire.gov.uk(External link)

Alternatively, postal address:

FAO Local Development Plan team

Development Planning & Regeneration

Economic Growth

East Ayrshire Council

The Opera House

8 John Finnie Street

Kilmarnock

KA1 1DD

Guidance documents

There is already a range of guidance documents that have been produced on how to prepare Local Place Plans. These are available for download under 'documents.' Whilst we have not wanted to duplicate this, we have put together a brief information sheet, explaining the key requirements and addressing some frequently asked questions. This can be downloaded in the documents section.

Useful resource(s)

Community Map Scotland is another really useful resource. Supported by Planning Aid Scotland (PAS), it provides support with digital mapping, specifically for communities building a Local Place Plan. This allows your to draw out areas on the map where you want, for example, things to be protected, areas that are suitable for housing and infrastructure, and where the cultural and social hot-spots are. The mapping software makes it really easy to produce interactive maps to share with your community for review and comment.

You may already be working with vibrant communities in relation to a Community Action Plan. Vibrant communities will continue to work with you, with support from us in Development Planning, where required. Contact information for Vibrant Communities is provide above.

Let us know what you want to do

If you are a community body and you may wish to produce a Local Place Plan, it would be really helpful for us to know this. Please fill out the LPP expression of interest form on this page, which also gives you the opportunity to ask us for support.