Planning and Architecture

Publications declutter

December 8, 2025 by planningarchitecture No Comments | Category Architecture, Planning, Uncategorized

The 2025 Programme for Government contained a commitment to declutter the planning system by removing all dated national planning advice.

This commitment continues our aim to reduce the volume of advice, to avoid confusion and reduce complexity. We consulted a number of stakeholders over the summer on a list of advice and other guidance that we were proposing to withdraw. Following this we are withdrawing 27 Planning Advice Notes (PANs) and 19 other pieces of guidance from our collection of current advice. This equates to 71% of the planning advice that was available (over 1000 pages).

Those documents, listed at the end of this blog, will from today, 8 December 2025, be marked as withdrawn on www.gov.scot.

We are conscious that some of the responses to the short consultation indicated that stakeholders felt that some of the documents we propose to withdraw should instead be retained and/or updated, however National Planning Framework 4 and the policies it contains provide the most up-to-date examples of Scottish Government policy. Advice and guidance is not intended to remain in place in perpetuity and given the age of most of the documents we would expect that the good practice they contain should by now be established practice.

We will continue to produce new guidance but our intention is for this to focus on those areas where there are pressures or a need for action in response to our delivery priorities. The forthcoming Delivery Programme update will provide more detail on the guidance which is already available to support NPF4.

Planning Advice Notes

Strategic Environment Assessment of Development Plans (1)
Planning and Archaeology (2)
Community Engagement (3)

Farm and Forestry Buildings (39)
Golf Courses and Associated Developments (43)
Community Councils and Planning (47)
Planning, Environmental Protection and Regulation (51)
Small Towns (52)
Private Finance Initiatives (55)
Improving Town Centres (59)
Natural Heritage (60)
Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (61)
Energy from Waste (63)

Reclamation of Surface Mineral Workings (64)

Trunk Roads Planning Applications Handling Best Practice Guidance (66)
Housing Quality (67)
Design Statements (68)

Conservation Areas (71)

Housing in the Countryside (72)
Rural Diversification (73)
Planning for Transport (75)
Designing Safer Places (77)
Inclusive Design (78)
Water and Drainage (79)
Control and Management of Fly Posting (80)
Local Authority Interest Developments (82)
Electronic Planning Guidance (70)

Other Planning Advice

Deep Geothermal
Microgeneration
Wind farm developments on peat land
Landfill gas
Anaerobic digestion
Large photovoltaic arrays
Heat demands
Woody biomass
Data protection
Hydro schemes
Energy storage
Onshore wind turbines
Flood risk
Designing Streets – aligning consents
Local authority street guidance
Commonwealth games village – case study
Auditing of new road schemes
Planning and waste management
Wind energy bid assessments
Net economic benefit

Tags: advice, national planning framework 4, planning

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