Locality Planning for Inclusive City Development
Lessons from Scottish Cities
The first post I made on here was about the Place Principle which underpins place-based policy-making in Scotland. I want to explore a little further in this piece how the planning system now supports the notion of locality planning in practice.
The planning system in Scotland provides individuals, communities and organisations with a variety of opportunities to help shape plans for their local areas. Between them, the Planning (Scotland) Act of 2019 and the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act of 2015 require, for each Local Authority area, the prepare of several documents – a Local Outcome Improvement Plan (LOIP), a Local Development Plan (LDP), Locality Plans (LPs) and Local Place Plans (LPPs).
Under the Planning legislation, each Local Authority is obliged to produce a Local Development Plan (LDP) which sets out the policies and proposals for the future use of land and buildings in their local area, informed by the Local Outcome Improvement Pan (LOIP) of which more below. It provides a vision for how the Local Authority area should change and develop addressing needs and opportunities in relation to the economy, housing, infrastructure, community facilities and the environment. LDPs must be renewed every 10 years.
The 2019 Planning legislation also introduced Local Place Plans to offer a direct way for local communities and community organisations to prepare their own plans that can be taken into consideration during the preparation of each new LDP. Communities are responsible for initiating, creating and producing LPPs. Authorities are required by the 2019 Planning Act to invite community councils and other community organisations to create their own community-led LPPs, although there is no requirement on local communities to produce one. Communities may feel for example, that their needs are covered in other planning documents such as the Local Outcome Improvement Plan (LOIP) or Locality Plans.
These latter plans stem from the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act of 2015 which established a partnership framework to encourage a coordinated approach from different service providers and reform of public service provision. In each Authority area there is a requirement to establish a Community Planning Partnership (CPP) which includes all statutory service providers in the area along with other public bodies such as Universities and representatives of business interests and from the voluntary sector. The CPP develops a citywide Local Outcome Improvement Plan (LOIP) and Locality Plans (LPs) which extend the citywide LOIP to locality level covering topics such as economy, people, place and community. CPPs are expected to engage with their communities in the preparation of the LOIP and Locality Plans.
Implementation
Scottish Local Authorities have established a variety of arrangements for the implementation of these requirements. A comparison of the planning arrangements in 4 major Scottish cities – Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee demonstrate some significant differences. Two aspects of the comparison are of particular interest for the purposes of this discussion: first is the approach adopted towards the concept of locality within the planning structures and second, the steps taken to secure community engagement in locality planning particularly, but also in the community planning process more widely. A final section of the paper will try to assess, in the light of these comparisons, the importance of the locality as a means to bring city-wide plans to a more local level and engage communities in the process.
Take first the concept of the ‘locality’ employed in Scottish cities’ plans. The Community Empowerment Act says that a locality must be either an electoral ward as defined in the Local Governance (Scotland) Act of 2004, or an area within the area of the local authority with a population that does not exceed 30,000. In practice, the delineation of city localities looks rather different.
For locality planning purposes, the City of Aberdeen has divided the city into 3 localities, (North, South and Central). Each of the city’s 37 Neighbourhoods is allocated to one of these localities. Within each locality some neighbourhoods have been designated as Priority Neighbourhoods, these being considered as needing additional support if they are to benefit from the same opportunities to thrive as other neighbourhoods within the city.
Each locality has a locality management team and a locality empowerment group (LEG). The LEGs comprises local people and partner organisations with the aim of working to jointly deliver community priorities. Any community member resident in the locality can apply for membership of a LEG.
The City of Edinburgh has divided the city into 4 localities – North East, South East, North West and South West. Each locality has a locality community planning partnership (LCPP). The core membership comes from the City of Edinburgh Council, The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, Police Scotland, NHS Lothian, the Health and Social Care Partnership, Skills Development Scotland, the voluntary sector and representatives of the Neighbourhood Networks in the Locality. The core membership essentially reflects that of the citywide Community Planning Partnership but at a more local level. Local communities within each locality are afforded representation on the LCPP through one representative drawn from each Neighbourhood Network within the locality. (Neighbourhood Networks were intended to be meetings of local people and organisations to consider local development and planning issues but many have failed to survive for a lack of a clear role.)
The map below illustrates the size of Edinburgh’s 4 localities.
The City of Dundee has established 8 Local Community Planning Partnerships (LCPPs) corresponding to the 8 electoral wards in the city. They work under the oversight of the Locality Leadership Group, chaired by the Chief Executive of Dundee City Council and tasked with giving strategic direction to locality work and with reporting on community planning to the Dundee Community Planning Partnership. Each LCPP has a Locality Leader and a Communities Officer and a membership from community planning partnership agencies, the voluntary sector and community representatives. Community organisations can apply for participation in LCPP activities. The City has published an Engagement and Participation Framework to guide how agencies encourage and build community participation.
LCPPs in Dundee
Locality planning in Glasgow is different again and has been developed against the background of a well-established Thriving Places programme which pre-dates the 2015 Community Empowerment legislation and has become the delivery vehicle for locality planning requirements in the Act. As required by the Community Empowerment Act, Glasgow has established a city-wide Glasgow Community Planning Partnership (GCPP) made up of a number of key public, private and community organisations with Glasgow-wide responsibility or interest. Each is represented at the highest executive level.
The GCPP is required to carry out locality planning in all neighbourhoods that are deprived when compared to the rest of the city. Originally these were the 9 areas identified by the Thriving Places programme, started in 2013 as a 10-year programme focused on the social well-being of people and generating momentum for community engagement and participation. Well-being trends have been monitored between 2015 and 2023, and partners have concluded a review of the thriving places progress which suggest some positive changes in these area compared to others not in the programme. There is more about this report later. In the light of this the GCPP is reforming its processes to deliver a comprehensive response to poverty and deprivation across the whole city and will establish 23 area partnerships to take this work forward.
The rationale for locality working
These pen-pictures of practice in the 4 cities highlights some clear differences in their approach to locality planning, although all acknowledge, at present at least, the importance of the locality in delivering a place-based response to locally defined priorities. In general terms, the aims of locality working are first, to improve outcomes for individuals resident within localities and second, to improve partnership working and information exchange between public sector agencies and with third sector and community organisations which can lead to innovative approaches to service delivery according to local needs. It rests on the belief that ‘one size fits nobody’ and that place differences require place-based responses.
These objectives place locality planning in an unusual position. Locality planning is neither top-down or bottom up. It should provide a system which has a degree of top-down direction, but provides a local collaborative leadership which gives scope to individual and partner agencies and crucially to locality residents and community groups. As such it may not fit comfortably with more traditional hierarchical public agencies. A number of issues arise if it is to succeed, which are discussed below.
Defining localities
Fundamental to any locality-based policy-making is the definition of a locality. The Scottish Government does this in terms of population size specifying a maximum of 30,000 people for an area to be considered a locality for planning purposes. However 2 of the cities (Aberdeen and Edinburgh) have defined localities as much larger – in one case a third of the city, and in the other around one quarter. These areas seem to be administratively defined: it is interesting to note that in both cases the localities are amalgamations of smaller areas – neighbourhoods or electoral wards - with clear differences between them.
Dundee has defined its localities as single electoral wards in line with Scottish Government guidance, but it still identifies priority neighbourhoods within these localities. Glasgow, on the other hand has started with neighbourhoods within its already-established place-based programme in areas of deprivation, and used this as the basis for meeting its community planning partnership obligations.
So defining localities involves questions of scale. How local does a locality need to be? Locality involves notions of place identity. Can residents identify with administratively defined areas which do not necessarily reflect social and community bonds?
Community engagement
The answers to these questions are likely to have significant implications for the extent and reality of community engagement.
Drawing on the notion of a ladder of participation first developed by Sherry Arnstein in 1969, levels of community engagement can be ordered on a continuum of increasing engagement running from, at one extreme, none, through to community control at the other. For the purposes of this essay, points on the continuum can be labelled as follows:
If the intentions for locality planning as envisaged in the Community Empowerment legislation are to be achieved, it would be expected that the locality community partnership arrangements in each of the cities described above would be operating at least at level 5 on the engagement scale. My suspicion however, based on limited participation in the Community Planning Partnership in one of these cities and from membership of a local community council, is that engagement with the community is likely to be much lower on the Arnstein scale.
Most community representatives are volunteers with limited time and knowledge to master the complexities of local service planning and collaboration as a basis for well-founded comments and proposals. In all the schemes, with maybe the exception of the Glasgow’s Thriving Places initiative, community representation is modest alongside the numerous public agencies involved. In addition, it is not always clear how the community representatives are chosen and which community constituencies they represent.
This would suggest that the bigger the geographical areas locality community planning partnerships cover, the more crucial these issues become, especially if the localities are not contiguous with ‘lived-communities’ within the city. Such communities are likely to be based on identifiable neighbourhoods. Mechanisms must be included to support neighbourhood representation if anything more that nominal community participation is to be achieved.
In this connection it should be noted that Scotland has a ready-made small area-based level of local government in the form of community councils. Local authorities are required to draw up schemes for community councils in their areas; each community council serving a local neighbourhood and subject to re-election through a local ballot every 4 years, and yet not all cities incorporate them as community representatives in their community planning partnerships.
Partnership working
Many of the issues which confront local authorities are multi-faceted and require a joined-up approach within and between service providers and yet there remain of examples of how difficult it often is for them to escape from siloed working. Different agencies and departments within agencies will have their own priorities and will wish to allocate their resources accordingly. Partnership working requires shared priorities, backed up by a willingness to share at least some resources. In times of restricted public expenditure agencies may be reluctant to share scarce resources, when ironically, there may be a better chance of meeting some policy objectives if they did.
But if agencies find it hard to achieve real collaborative policy action so it is all the more difficult for communities to contribute as equal partners within the community planning processes. As we have seen, community representatives are relatively few in number, are volunteer participants and the basis of their selection for the role is not always clear.
Local resources
Partnership working is strengthened when all parties have something valuable to contribute. Community representatives for the most part will contribute knowledge based on local experience and opinion. Sometimes this can be well-founded on local surveys and data gathering, and thought-though action proposals to tackle issues as they are manifested in local areas. It requires particular determination on the part of (volunteer) community representatives or organizations to analyze specific local situations within the wide scope of agency planning. This un-equal knowledge base often serves to limit the significance of local contributions to community partnerships. It is perhaps because of these difficulties that few community-initiated Local Plans under the 2019 Planning Act have been made so far.
However, the resources available to local communities can be extended through a sharing of resources from local authorities to localities under a variety of local participatory budgeting arrangements. Of the cities featured here for example, Dundee and Glasgow provide area budgets to localities for them to allocate to address particular local needs These budgets are mainly used to provide grants to local community and voluntary organisations to provide services that will help to achieve the Area Partnership's local priorities and City Council objectives. As Glasgow points out, any application for funding from the Area Partnership Budget needs to demonstrate a fit with local priorities and the involvement of local communities.
In Edinburgh there are some more limited participatory budgeting schemes such as the well-established Leith Decides initiative whereby local residents vote on the allocation of funds to organisations in the local area.
These schemes empower communities to make decisions and require them to be accountable for the decisions made. Decisions may also lead to much more visible signs of results from community action, which in turn is likely to boost community participation in community planning.
Impact
It is hard to determine the impact of incorporating the representation of localities within community planning partnerships both at the locality level or at the authority wide level. As we have seen size matters: even where locality boundaries are drawn broadly, they are subdivided into more local neighbourhoods when it comes to local policy action.
The nature of collaboration and partnership working in practice within the Local Community Planning Partnerships matters too. The suggestion is that it may often not be very far along Arnstein’s ladder of collaboration.
Of the cities referred to here, Glasgow has published a report on the work of its Thriving Places (TPs) initiative. Some limit indicators of improved outcomes in Locality Plans are included although the report makes clear that further work is needed to evolve a more substantial measurement of performance. The initial analysis can point to modest improvements in the proportion of TP residents with a positive perception of mental well-being, in the proportion of working age TP residents who are employment deprived and who are income deprived. Nevertheless the proportions in the TP areas remain significantly worse than in Glasgow as a whole. Despite these improved outcomes, there was still a feeling from the majority of respondence to the evaluation of the TP projects that community engagement did not have a significant impact on priorities within locality plans.
The report recognized that there were changes required of the TP projects to meet the requirements of the Community Empowerment Act, and locality planning has now been extended to all areas of the city. It recognized that effective locality planning requires a supportive environment for collective action by all participants and that ‘everyone should be afforded a role to play’. There was a need for training for both agency staff and community representatives in locality planning. It also pointed to the need for a clearer understanding of the requirements and purpose of locality plans amongst partners, including communities, and a clearer process for producing locality plans.
Conclusions
As already stated, experience makes clear ‘one-size suits no-one’. An ability to be innovative in local service delivery to reflect the wide variation between localities within cities is essential. It seems clear that effective locality planning requires a strengthening of participatory democracy and local community development work. It must be based on socially identifiable communities rather than administrative criteria. It requires a broad-based approach to the incorporation of existing community organisations such as community councils rather than individual representatives. It requires adequate resourcing based-on the pooling of funds by community partners and including community organisations. It must rely on clarity of purpose and roles for all partners including community representatives.
There is some way to go before these conditions are in place in many places so that the full benefits of locality planning can be realized.