COMMUNITY-lED PLANNING
What IS A ‘LOCAL PLACE PLAN’?
Local Place Plans give local communities more influence over what happens in their area. Their most important feature is that they are led by the community itself.
A Local Place Plan is the village’s opportunity to express its ambitions for the village, the area within the Community Council boundary:
Local Place Plans are part of new planning legislation that enables communities to identify their local priorities and develop a plan to tackle them. The planning authority (Dumfries and Galloway Council) is legally obliged to take account of registered Local Place Plans as it prepares its new Dumfries and Galloway Local Development Plan (LDP3).
The Scottish Government says that Local Place Plans “offer the opportunity for a community-led, collaborative approach to creating great local places… effectively empowering communities to play a proactive role in defining the future of their places” (Circular 1/2022, paragraph 3).
You can find out more about Local Place Plans on this government webpage.
Although Local Place Plans must include proposals for the development and use of land, they can include other things that the community might want to achieve too.
SOME EXAMPLES
More and more communities around Scotland have started to produce Local Place Plans since the new legislation came into force in 2023.
Take a look at the recent examples below to give you a flavour of the kind of things that other village plans have covered. Each is different, because each community has distinct needs. Wanlockhead’s plan will be different again.
KINLOCHLEVEN Local Place Plan
Kinlochleven Local Place Plan was registered in March 2025, and represents a new dawn for the community.
Like Wanlockhead, Kinlochleven is an isolated former industrial village - although in Kinlochleven’s case, based around aluminium rather than lead.
Since the smelter closed 20 years ago, the village has seen some regeneration and investment, but more is needed. After false starts over the years, the Plan lays out a new future based on community action and more productive relationships with the main local landowner and the public sector.
According to the chair of the Community Council, the process of producing the Plan has helped to improve relationships within the village and with others, and get things moving.
Ardgour Local Place Plan
Ardgour Local Place Plan was registered in April 2024. It combines quick wins and long term ambitions, all designed to stabilise and increase the population of around 700 people spread across a few small settlements.
Part of the purpose of the plan was to influence future Council planning policy about things like future housing development and improved transport links.
But the plan also aimed to steer how local community benefit funds, similar in scale to those available in Wanlockhead, could be spent.
Within weeks the Plan had helped the community to secure money from the community benefit funds to employ a development worker to take forward the proposals in the plan. Up until then, everything had been done by volunteers, so that was a big step forward.
The development worker is now busy progressing lots of projects in the plan, from new housing to better transport infrastructure.
LOCHALSH Local Place Plan
Lochalsh Local Place Plan was registered in October 2024. It covers lots of small remote villages on the west coast, from Arnisdale and Glenelg in the south to Plockton and Stromeferry in the north. Most of them are a similar size or smaller than Wanlockhead.
A community action plan had been prepared a couple of years earlier, identified the community’s priorities like housing, jobs, childcare, visitor facilitiies and transport.
The Local Place Plan shows how those priorities should land on the ground across the area: where transport should be improved, where housing should be improved, which community facilities need investment, and so on.
Because young people are the lifeblood of the communities, lots of work was done with young people to prepare the plan.
Why bother?
Although Local Place Plans are new (like the one recently prepared in Kirkconnel), many communities have used similar community-led plans to good effect over the last couple of decades - including locally in Sanquhar, Moffat and Douglas.
Here are three examples from elsewhere.
Langholm Community Plan
Langholm’s 10-year Community Plan, produced in 2020, led immediately to funding for two community workers who put together the successful community buyout of the local estate from the local landowner, Buccleuch, a year later.
Crianlarich into Action
Crianlarich’s 2011 community action plan led to an immediate grant of £15,000 to upgrade the public toilets, a long lease of the derelict station yard in the village centre by the Council to the community for a park, picnic tables and car parking, and - after a few years of hard work - a £200,000 path network next to the village on forestry land for locals and visitors.
Huntly: Room to Thrive
The community’s 2018 and 2022 plans resulted in 6 months rent free lease of a closed RBS bank on the town square as a community space.
That then led to community purchase of the bank and two vacant shops on the square a year later, and their refurbishment and reopening as business premises.
You can read more about what the community has achieved on their development trust’s website.
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within the community and with the public and private sectors, helping things to get done rather than stuck in debate
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for example, helping community projects to get funding
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influencing services like ducation, health, transport and planning
Generally, other communities have found that preparing their own plan can:
Preparing a Local Place Plan takes time and effort, and there is no guarantee that everything will be implemented. But a plan will give the village extra opportunities and influence to shape the village’s future that wouldn’t otherwise exist.