View from Scotland: Could the country’s best-laid biodiversity plans gang aft a-gley?

Wheat field with thistles, Ayrshire. © Stuart Hay

Scottish planning policy may aspire to enhance biodiversity through new housing development, but without clearer guidance, and enhanced green skills and resources in local authorities, it will fail to achieve either.

Scotland is a world leader in biodiversity preservation, on paper at least.

Documents such as 2023’s National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4) say all the right things; however, to steal a tenuous biodiversity-related quote from Rabbie Burns, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley, / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain.” In other words: The best-laid plans often go awry.

The sad truth is those involved in development will experience stress and anxiety, attempting to translate into practice. The problems are twofold:

1) Planning authorities are a mere semblance of their former selves, hollowed out by nearly two decades of austerity. They simply don’t have the capacity or bandwidth to translate noble ideals into practical advice to applicants – especially with very little, if any, in-house, dedicated ecological and landscape expertise to interpret any surveys received.

2) As yet, there is little approved guidance for NPF4, which makes practical interpretation difficult. In some cases, English guidance is being used as a stopgap measure, despite notable contextual differences.

In this vacuum, councils are playing it safe and requesting surveys as a default precursor to determining mitigation measures. However, collecting this data is expensive, often seasonal, and can throw projects months behind schedule –compounding and exacerbating other delays. Sadly, this means that fixing listed buildings, bringing derelict rural buildings back into use, or redeveloping brownfield sites becomes much riskier. Poorly targeted and disproportionate requests for surveys create significant extra hurdles to much-needed housing projects. Nor does this reactionary approach help to collect biodiversity data in a strategic or coordinated way.

This is why the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) has written to Ivan McKee MSP, the Scottish Government Minister responsible for planning, to highlight how well-intentioned biodiversity enhancement policies are creating a level of uncertainty that is highly detrimental. Nor is it clear, in the context of a housing emergency, where biodiversity goals rank if an otherwise viable project is badly delayed or ultimately abandoned. From the RIAS perspective, a biodiversity-led system must start at the plan preparation and survey stage to reduce uncertainty and collect data at scale. Secondly, at a site level, nothing will really improve until Scotland’s hard-pressed planning system is properly resourced, including recruiting professionals with practical ecological and landscape expertise. Without a clearer route from policy to practice, Robert Burns’ closing words from ‘To a Mouse’ aptly sums things up on Scotland’s biodiversity efforts: “Backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear! An’ forward, tho’ I cannot see, I guess an’ fear!”