Spotlight on Planning - enabling development during exceptional times
By Louise Shearer
Part of my role includes reviewing performance information in council committee reports and highlighting examples of positive performance to our staff and the wider community. I noticed some interesting statistics about the Planning Service’s role in supporting the community throughout COVID, despite the fact that the construction industry had effectively been shut down between March and June, and I was keen to find out more.
Iain McDiarmid is our Executive Manager – Planning and he was my first port of call.
Iain, can you tell me a bit more about the importance of your service’s role during COVID?
For me, our service was pivotal in not only enabling development, but also making sure that the construction industry could hit the ground running once things started opening up after lockdown.
Members of your service all worked from home throughout – so can you tell me a bit more about what that was like? I’m assuming that things like site visits stopped.
Yes, the service relocated to working from home and just found new and different ways of doing the things that we could continue to do during lockdown. Of course, that was really helped by the fact that our Business Support Team had put in a huge amount of effort beforehand to help us become an online, almost paperless office.
I’m going to find out a bit more about that from one of your Business Support Officers later, but I’m keen to understand what kinds of things you continued to offer your customers to help them be as ready as possible to restart post-lockdown.
A group of agents, architects and builders normally meets with Planning Service staff on a regular basis so that staff can hear about issues for developers and, in turn, developers can highlight topics they’d like to find out more about. During lockdown, we kept the contact going by email to make sure they had the crucial updates on our service situation, information on legislative changes and any guidance from the Scottish Government on planning and building standards matters.
Some statistics (activity during 1 April to 30 September 2020):
Planning Service:
- 323 planning applications received (95 were pre-applications or advice before application). This compared with 293 applications in the same period the year before.
- 618 consultations issued on planning developments to other relevant council services, community councils, SEPA etc. Planning officers take responses into consideration as part of the approval process.
- 172 notifications of major applications. This is a new process introduced earlier this year where we notify our councillors and MSP of any major developments.
Building Standards:
- 80 approvals issued, which had 1,425 documents associated with them
Other activity included:
- One screening opinion has been made
- Continued to progress the Draft Shetland Islands Regional Marine Plan
I’m interested to find out more about what’s involved in a screening opinion and about your involvement with Staney Hill. Can you expand on this Iain?
Screening opinions are where we discuss with developers whether their development is covered by the Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations – depending on its size, nature or location.
We try to work very closely with developers as they progress projects. With Staney Hill, we used the Quality Audit process, which brings together the developer and their architects, the Planning Service, other council services and external stakeholders to discuss and debate the proposals. The intention is that by the time an application is submitted, there are no surprises and it should proceed smoothly to decision.
You mentioned to me when we first spoke about this feature that Hjaltland Housing Association had spoken very positively about your service during lockdown. I spoke to the Association’s Head of Investment, Paul Leask:
"We were going through the Quality Audit process for the Staney Hill development when the lockdown was introduced and, despite the significant challenges this must have presented for the Planning Service, they remained committed to our project and attended all the subsequent meetings which, due to the pandemic, were being held online. They were really quick at adapting to the new way we were doing things and in particular supporting us with the public consultation which had to be done electronically.
"Prior to the lockdown we had been used to setting up face-to-face meetings with the public and other stakeholders, and the Planning Team were very good at helping us see how we could design the consultation around the new requirements. They were really supportive throughout, which made our job a lot easier." - Paul Leask, Hjaltland Housing Association -
I was also interested to find out more about the Draft Shetland Islands Regional Marine Plan (mentioned in the statistics above) so I caught up with the council’s Coastal Zone Manager, Simon Pallant, to find out more.
Simon, can you tell me a bit more about the Draft Shetland Islands Regional Marine Plan (SIRMP)? What is it and why is it important?
It is the plan for the Shetland Islands Marine Region, which includes all territorial waters out to 12 nautical miles. The area is the equivalent to 12 305km2, approximately seven times the land area of the Shetland Islands!
It presents a picture of the marine environment in Shetland to include all aspects of marine and coastal resource use, such as aquaculture, marine renewables, fishing, oil and gas and the environment.
It contains policies and data to support a range of marine decisions, including those made by our Planning Service. It will be used by developers in the development of their proposals and public authorities in their consideration of consents (including planning, licensing and leasing).
The duty to produce a regional marine plan is required under the Marine (Scotland) Act 2010. It’s important because the vision of the SIRMP is for Shetland to have clean, healthy, safe, productive and diverse seas, managed to meet the long-term needs of nature and local people. So it provides a plan-led approach to the management of Shetland’s coastal and marine waters to ensure that development goes in the right place at the right time.
The draft SIRMP will go before Council early next year for approval. Provided it goes forward for adoption, it will then be sent to Scottish Ministers and Marine Scotland for consideration. It is at an advanced stage and should be the first Regional Marine Plan to be adopted in Scotland.
I then spoke to Business Support Officer, Fiona Sutherland, to find out more about the lockdown experience as she’s found it and how her worked helped the service operate so well in a paperless way.
Fiona – I hear you’ve been helping the service be a successful online and paperless office. Can you tell me a bit more about that project?
I was working in Building Standards when the Scottish Government’s eDevelopmentScot website went live and we took the decision then to start going paperless. Sometimes there can be literally hundreds of plans accompanying a building warrant application, and we realised we needed to find a better way to handle that amount of paper. All our work is now task based and runs through a piece of software that is specifically designed to handle those tasks.
Following that success, the Business Support Team were asked to do the same within other parts of the Planning Service. COVID fast tracked progress to achieve a completely paperless planning office and it’s great that the whole team have got on board and adopted this new way of working. We learned from the initial embedding of the new way of working and now we are making improvements all the time.
What are the benefits of being digital?
The benefits for the Business Support Team were instant and freed up a lot our time. It’s meant that we are now leading on validating planning applications, which used to be a planning officer’s task, but we have been able to pick that up, creating another efficiency.
We very much work on the principle of sharing workloads and ways of working within the team and this is made more possible now that our systems are much more aligned. Business Support really is the hub of the office so it’s important that we keep our digital files in order and do a really good job for our customers.
And finally, back to Iain McDiarmid.
One final question Iain – what have you learned as a result of lockdown?
We’ve all had to fully embrace the reality of the paperless office and make full use of technology over the last eight months and I think this has improved things for the team for the better. We’re more efficient, we’ve adapted to team working online and finding different ways to do things. I also think working from home has helped improve some of the team’s work-life balance. There is definitely things we have learnt that we can take with us into whatever becomes the ‘new normal’ and we are fully committed to building back better than we were before.