Nick Marshall from Northfield Willowbrae CC shares his experience in shaping a Local Place Plan (LPP). Contact him at
"We decided to do a LPP late last year, when CEC first announced they were keen to have them submitted. We were able to put together a small team including two people with experience of participatory planning and one former senior planner. The deadline looks to be some time late in 2025. We are aiming to submit around Easter.
CEC told us that there was no funding to help us, so we have been paying for meeting venues and posters from our small CC funds. We have recently been approved for a community grant of £1000. We have done most of the work ourselves on such things as leaflet design and drafting. Total costs will be around £1500, plus a lot of volunteer time.
The main focus of our work to date has been through participatory meetings, based on the Scot Gov 'Place Standard Tool', which offers an excellent planning template. ( https://www.ourplace.scot/tool ) We printed a questionnaire derived from this and set up an online questionnaire on the Improvement Service website, adapted from their standard online questionnaire.
(See here for more: https://www.improvementservice.org.uk/products-and-services/planning-and-place-based-approaches )
We have been running Saturday morning free coffee events for two hours or so every two months, placed posters on local noticeboards and on some bus shelters, and used some banners. We've arranged three walkabouts so far, in Piershill, Lady Nairne and Northfield, and have held a church hall and a local pub meeting. We've had up to 30 attendees at these events.
With about 50 questionnaires returned and a further 60 online forms completed, we are ready to move on to the next stage. We need to draw up an explanatory summary of current CEC policies as they relate to our area, then sit down to analyse the responses we've received from people so we can get a clear fix on the really key issues and how residents feel about them. That way we can identify what we include in the LPP and what we encourage CEC to take forward by other means.
Then it's a case of drafting the LPP and bringing residents, neighbouring community councils and (importantly) local elected councillors into the picture. Hopefully, that leads us to submitting a final version to CEC in eight months' time or so.
This is a big local learning exercise; time-consuming but so far very worthwhile. I'm happy to share more on how we have gone about it."
End/NM