Craig McLaren, National Planning Improvement Champion, discusses how the findings of a new customer and stakeholder survey are informing ways forward for planning authorities.
The National Planning Improvement team in the Improvement Service has published the results of our first National Customer and Stakeholder Survey for all 34 planning authorities across Scotland. We have undertaken this to help them and their users to gain a better understanding of the challenges faced in providing high levels of customer care and satisfaction with the service provided. It is part of wider work being taken through the pilot National Planning Improvement Framework (NPIF) that allows planning authorities to assess their performance across 12 attributes, which include customer care and engagement with communities and stakeholders. This assessment is then used to identify improvement actions to be taken forward.
The survey is undertaken at a time when public services are working within a reduced resource base and public confidence in them can be low. The most recent Scottish Housholder Survey (2023) found that 42% of people strongly or somewhat agreed that their council provides a high quality service and that the council was doing their best with the money available. Only 30% strongly or somewhat agreed that their council was good at letting them know how it was performing.
Our survey attracted over 600 responses covering every planning authority area in Scotland, with over 90% of their interactions with the planning service being submitting or commenting on a planning application. Just under 40% of respondents came from a community member, around 34% from an applicant and 25% from a consultant or architect.
The headline message is that 46% of respondents were very satisfied or satisfied with the overall service provided by planning authorities with 54% very unsatisfied or unsatisfied. Around 45% expressed satisfaction on the time taken to deal with applications or enquiries, though 55% were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. Just under half (49.5%) were very satisfied/ satisfied with the standard of communication from the planning service. In terms of the quality of information provided by the planning authority 54% expressed satisfaction with 46% expressing dissatisfaction. The responses also showed that 55% strongly agreed or agreed that they were treated fairly by the planning service.
It is clear from the survey that community members had higher dissatisfaction rates of all the respondents. In many ways these figures did not come as a surprise, as engaging with communities has been a recurring topic in discussions through the NPIF.
The results, though sobering, are very useful. They provide us with intelligence and evidence that can help us to work with planning authorities to identify areas where we can make improvements. Indeed, many of the 10 planning authorities who have completed the NPIF process have already set out what they will do to and have agreed 29 separate actions on customer care in their improvement action plans.
We will be undertaking the survey again at the end of the year, so this is very much the starting point of the improvement journey.