Masterplan Consent Areas: guidance

Where?

Potential locations for MCAs

36. We see potential for MCAs to be used across Scotland, in urban, rural and island areas. MCAs have the potential to unlock significant and strategic growth areas, including of brownfield land, for housing development and to also support wider objectives including town centre renewal.

37. MCAs can support our plan-led approach, as a delivery tool for LDP spatial strategies and particular local priorities (including those identified in Local Place Plans (LPPs)), actively incentivising investment in those planned developments. Ministers will expect to see references to MCAs within LDP Delivery Programmes where appropriate, to show how the authority will facilitate and accelerate delivery of allocations or proposals within its LDP.

38. MCAs will also allow planning authorities to show leadership and react dynamically to new opportunities that may not feature within the LDP. As with proposals progressed through the planning application route, consent can be granted through MCA schemes for sites which are not allocated in the development plan, where other material considerations outweigh. MCAs can provide a regulatory framework to plan for key development priorities that emerge outwith the plan cycle, and provide an authority-led approach to providing a planning framework for such sites. In such circumstances, it will be for the planning authority to weigh up all relevant development plan policies, as well as relevant material considerations, in applying balanced planning judgement.

Places that cannot be included in a scheme

39. Schedule 5A of the 1997 Act sets out a series of designations of international and national importance which cannot be included in a scheme. This was subject to consultation with the Key Agencies Group and considered and agreed by the Scottish Parliament through the 2019 Act. These include European Sites (including Special Areas of Conservation and Special Protection Areas), marine protected areas, National Scenic Areas, Ramsar Sites, Sites of Special Scientific Interest, World Heritage Sites and their buffers, and places covered by a nature conservation order or a land management order under the Nature Conservation (Scotland) Act 2004).

40. In addition, Regulation 9 ensures that no MCA scheme can grant authorisation for development which is likely to have an adverse effect on a European site in Great Britain or a European offshore marine site which is not directly connected with or necessary to the management of the site. This approach aligns with the procedure for planning permission.

41. Proposed European Sites should be afforded the same level of protection as designated European Sites, as is the case for planning applications.