Preparations are underway to plan the shape of Edinburgh for the next 14 years just as the UK Government is about to power up England’s city regions, so what will the Scottish Government do to help keep the capital competitive, asks Herald columnist John McLellan.

For most people the only brush with the planning authorities is when they want a wee extension, or if the neighbour wants a very big one. Or when a big ugly building goes up and locals wonder how it got permission. 

But drop Local Development Plan (LDP) into pub conversations and you risk being shunned and avoided as the local bore, and in an attempt to make what is fundamental process in shaping our communities sound more snappy and exciting, Edinburgh Council officers imaginatively renamed it City Plan and stuck a date on it, giving us City Plan 2030.

It only seems like yesterday I was arguing the toss with Edinburgh  Council officers about City Plan 2030 before it was published in 2021, but it’s less than two years since what is the blueprint for the future shape of the capital was formally adopted. Now with less than four years to go, the preparations for City Plan 2040 have begun.

Maybe including the date to make it sound futuristic and urgent was a dumb idea, but if only there was a sense of urgency instead of countless meetings for councillors to play fantasy town planning. It’s an intensely political process which, from what I saw, involved left-wingers agreeing with each other while ignoring reality and planning for a world they would like, not as it is.

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That is not to say LDPs are created in a vacuum. As a legal requirement for all authorities to set planning policies with which applications must comply, they require ministerial approval and the Scottish Government lays the foundations and gives direction so local authorities understand what will pass muster. It’s also a function of central government to identify national priorities and in the case of economically crucial cities, that should mean working in partnership to deliver them.

Stuff like major transport infrastructure, AI growth zones, enterprise areas with permitted development rights, free ports and new towns and are all government functions with significant impact on local planning, and as both the UK and Scottish Governments are big on central direction and planned economies − and both apparently committed to economic growth − the direction should be clear. In Scotland, it certainly is as far as approving renewable energy schemes is concerned, but the rest of it, not so much.

Speaking to an experienced local government figure well-versed in these processes, eyes have turned to the south where in a now customary absence of direction from the Prime Minister, for better or worse, Chancellor Rachel Reeves is trying to push a programme to get the economy moving, outlined in her second Mais Lecture to the University of London’s Bayes Business School a fortnight ago.

While there were token references to the devolved nations, the guts of the speech were about powering up the English regions, and for anyone concerned about the health of the Scottish economy and the immediate future of Scotland’s cities, it should be a wake-up call.

Edinburgh Council regularly publishes comparisons with other UK cities and it’s always very favourable, largely for historic reasons as an administrative and legal capital city and a major university town. Manchester has been punching well above its weight since the late city council chief executive Howard Bernstein led the way for regeneration of the wider conurbation, now being taken forward by Mayor Andy Burnham but Reeves has signalled her intention to devolve revenue raising to English city regions which will give them more flexibility and autonomy, but also the creation of new towns and serious investment in transport infrastructure to prime economic activity.

It’s not just massive expansion near Manchester and Leeds; the plans for a new Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor should give Glasgow and Edinburgh cause to sit up.  Up to 40,000 homes could be built around a new railway hub at Tempsford in Bedfordshire, linked to the university cities as well as London. It could also connect to the original new town, much maligned Milton Keynes, which is also earmarked for another 40,000 homes.

What, then, is the plan for Edinburgh and the Lothians? West Edinburgh is screaming out for the Scottish Government to press the accelerator, but the signs are that tumbleweed will blow across Ingliston for years despite it being probably the best-connected, underdeveloped site in Scotland. Developments are held up because of protracted arguments about who pays for essential infrastructure, and even when new houses are delivered at scale, as they are in East Lothian, very little thought is given to the transport implications, or indeed to changing demographics which demand more city flats.

All of this feeds into City Plan 2040 as the foundation of a growth programme and although the airport area will be zoned for new homes, little will be done to change the glacial pace of delivery. In a recent article for The Scotsman, Scottish Financial Enterprise chief executive Sandy Begbie, bemoaned the lack of ambition to harness private capital for public benefit, contrasting with Hong Kong where public and private partnerships, now dirty words in Scottish Government circles, deliver infrastructure. “Debate on alternative models too often collapses into shorthand arguments about privatisation,” he wrote.

“Edinburgh and Glasgow — both ranked among the world’s top 35 financial centres — too often feel like large towns rather than global hubs,” he said, blaming political choices. Rachel Reeves spoke about maximising “the value added by AI to the wider economy and the public sector through accelerated adoption,” while Edinburgh councillors vote for a pointless and unenforceable moratorium on data centres.

When the SNP, virtually guaranteed to be back in office after May’s election, publishes its manifesto maybe there will be a genuine commitment to power the economy, but with the departure of one of the few pro-growth voices in the cabinet, Kate Forbes, who will insist a Scottish growth plan which incentivises private investment is a priority whether the Reeves plan delivers or not?

As it stands, Edinburgh better hope it doesn’t come off because, Manchester, Leeds and Oxford-Cambridge are after our lunch.

John McLellan is a former Edinburgh Evening News and Scotsman editor, now director of the Scottish news publishing trade association, Newsbrands Scotland. Brought up in Glasgow, McLellan has lived and worked in Edinburgh for over 30 years, and was a City of Edinburgh councillor for the Scottish Conservatives from 2017-22

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