SPEL - Part 1

The Scottish Planning and Environmental Law - SPEL - Conference is widely accepted as the premier planning law event in Scotland. The conference presents attendees with an opportunity to hear about topical planning issues from key speakers and to participate in discussion and debate at the very highest level.

Over the next two days APTSec will post an informal report which was produced, from the community perspective, by a new contact APT has met through our association with recently formed group, Planning Democracy (Scotland Wide). More details about the author in the last instalment.

Scottish Planning and Environmental Law Conference 21st May 2009


Report from a Community Representative

"I was fortunate to receive a complimentary invite to the SPEL Conference and found it very worthwhile to have taken the time out to attend.

The first speaker was Ken Ross OBE; Chairman of the Scottish Property Federation, his presentation was an overview of “The Scottish Economy and Implications for the Development Industry”. I found him very informative, he said it as it is, he didn’t spend time analysing how we got here or apportioning blame. His message was simple - here are the facts of where we are - we now have to find a way to deal with it.

The facts are that there will be no return to the pre August 2007 financial environment; it could potentially be 2064 before we get back to building the same number of houses a year as before the credit crisis. The days of planning gains are over, as Developers are highly unlikely to get funding from the financial institutions in the future for Section 75 agreements. This will impact considerably on infrastructure improvements which are frequently included in planning agreements for major developments. Mr Ross explained that financial institutions now require more conditions to be satisfied for funding agreements, in fact, on some occasions, there can be more conditions than the number that would normally be part of a planning approval. Frequently the conditions required by each of these parties contradict each other making it impossible to move forward even with approvals that are already in place. This means that the greatest influence on planning and development is more likely to come from the financial institutions as opposed to the usual interested parties.

Government funding will be limited, although there is an initiative to have the Banks release some funding for certain projects. With more and more decision making being devolved to Local Authorities there will be uncertainty and inconsistency in the allocation of funding. It could be that LAs’ who are feeling the pinch of the credit crunch will use the finance to maintain current services as opposed to investing in public service development projects.

The market will be dominated by developments that the financial institutions regard as prime while the less profitable sub-prime developments will suffer considerably. Regeneration projects will require “bucket loads” of subsidies as these will be viewed as sub-prime by the Banks. Mr Ross suggests that we will have to ask ourselves more detailed questions about what kind of developments we need and where - do we need more retail, will we happily pay more tax for regeneration projects, how do we maintain communities?..."


More details about Planning Democracy in later blogs