Planning for Growth: Scotland, produced by CBI Scotland with input from its members, shows how planning reform can accelerate investment, infrastructure and economic development.

The report paints a picture of a planning service stretched thin. Funding for planning has fallen sharply, with real-terms local authority spending down 28.6% since 2010/11, even as demand for major infrastructure decisions grows. The workforce gap is also widening. Scotland produces around 150 new planners a year, against an estimated need for 700 over the next decade and a half.

Business leaders say the resulting frustrations are consistent across sectors. Inconsistent decisions between authorities, slow turnaround times, and processes that have become more burdensome than the outcomes they’re meant to protect.

The report groups its recommendations into four themes:

1. Capacity — Ringfencing planning application fees so they’re reinvested in services, creating new routes into the planning profession, and giving planning hubs the resources to deploy specialists on complex projects like offshore wind and data centres.
2. Speed and simplicity — Stripping back outdated requirements (some guidance dates back over thirty years), setting statutory decision timescales under the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, and creating a Major Projects Office to coordinate consents through a single gateway.
3. Sector-specific fixes — Targeted measures for energy and marine consenting, including a 52-week timeline for wayleaves and compulsory purchase orders, and a dedicated framework for floating offshore wind, which will be needed for the roughly 60% of Scotland’s wind resource located in deep water. The report also flags the scale of digital investment at stake, noting the Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone alone is projected to attract £8.2 billion in private investment and support over 3,400 jobs. On housing, it calls for a national target of at least 25,000 new homes annually.
4. Accountability — A new national Planning Performance Framework to track decision times and approval rates across all 34 local authorities, with consequences for underperformance, plus a single, nationally funded technology programme rather than 34 separate digital strategies.

Gavin Newlands, chair, the CBI Scotland Infrastructure Working Group and executive director of corporate affairs, AGS Airports, said: “Whether it is transport, clean energy, housing or digital infrastructure, Scotland’s future prosperity depends on our ability to deliver major projects at pace.

“A properly resourced planning system that is transparent, consistent and agile is essential to unlocking investment, accelerating delivery and supporting economic growth.”

A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: “We recognise the importance of planning in enabling good quality development and supporting economic growth.

“The Scottish Government undertook extensive, constructive engagement with a wide range of stakeholders during the first 100 days to identify the key challenges and opportunities to improve planning performance.

“We will set out a full programme of planning reform in due course.”