In this week's Councillor Column, David Kinniburgh writes about Argyll and Bute's new local development plan, which will shape the way the area's built environment evolves over the next few years.

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Under current planning legislation a planning authority has a statutory duty under the Planning Etc. (Scotland) Act 2006 to prepare Development Plans for their area every five years.

As such, when the current Local Development Plan for Argyll and Bute was adopted in March 2015, the process to replace it with Local Development Plan 2 (LDP2) commenced within the year, in January 2016, when the council agreed the governance regime known as the Development Plan Scheme (DPS), which sets out the delivery timeline for LDP2 and is updated annually.

Through 2016, officers carried out the first stages of the DPS process of developing LDP2 by completing an assessment of all the current allocations and potential development areas in the current plan, to examine their effectiveness and an assessment of what was required to keep policies up to date and in alignment with current government policy and legislation was completed.

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A ‘call for sites’ was also carried out to identify future development opportunity sites to accommodate future growth in Argyll and Bute for the next 10 years and to assess potential growth in the longer term.

From the information gathered in this process, officers commenced the pre Main Issues Report engagement with key agencies and stakeholders, community councils and councillors – and from the findings of this pre-engagement, the Main Issues Report (MIR) was produced and then published in May 2018 for an eight-week consultation period involving communities, developers, key agencies, interested groups and other stakeholders.

This was the first consultation period in the development of LDP2.

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More than 100 representations to the consultation were received and on completion the analyses of the content enabled planning officers to commence work on developing the draft LDP2, and the completed draft LDP2 was presented to and approved by the full council at the end of last month.

On approval, the draft LDP2 became the ‘settled view’ of the council, and will now be published for an eight-week consultation period later in the year, together with a range of other draft documents which will accompany the plan.

I would encourage all stakeholders and communities to get involved in the upcoming public consultation to ensure that their views are considered when the proposed LDP2 is submitted to the Scottish Government for examination.

This process can take approximately nine months, and it is anticipated that the new plan will be considered for adoption by the council in early 2021.

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