Planning Obligations and Good Neighbour Agreements: draft guidance
Draft guidance for comments on how planning obligations can be used to make developments acceptable, including advice on development planning and addressing cumulative impacts.
Review of Planning Obligations guidance
Planning obligations are a mechanism which can be used to make developments acceptable by ensuring that they comply with planning policy. They are often used to facilitate the delivery of infrastructure which is needed alongside planned development, and to ensure the provision of affordable housing.
The attached draft guidance, when finalised, will replace Planning Circular 3/2012. The guidance needs to be updated to reflect the new development planning system and developments in law and practice since the publication of that Circular, and to address issues that have arisen in that time.
Our ambition is that the new guidance will provide greater certainty for all parties. Through the development planning system, planning authorities should set out clear policies for the use of planning obligations and methods for calculating developer contributions. This more front-loaded approach will provide developers with earlier certainty around what will be required of them, and clear justification will help give local authorities and other infrastructure providers confidence in receiving the contributions set out. This will support the plan-led and delivery-focused system we want to see.
Key changes
The draft new Circular re-uses substantial amounts of the previous text, but it is rearranged to make the structure clearer. Some key changes are as follows:
- Setting out how developer contributions policies should be included within new-style development plans
- Clarifying how to provide clear justification for contributions addressing cumulative impacts
- Emphasising the importance of development viability in the development of policies and negotiation of individual obligations.
- Reviewing the guidance on the policy tests and how they relate to planning decisions
- Setting out some considerations around the content of legal agreements. This is based largely on the 2020 report from the Law Society of Scotland and recent work by HOPS and SOLAR. We expect more detailed advice on the practical aspects of drafting to result from that work in the coming months.
Note that we have considered views expressed during our initial engagement about when the costs of proposed infrastructure should be determined. We confirm that this should be included in Delivery Programmes, as they are likely to need adjustment over the period of the LDP. The guidance emphasises the expectation that partners from both the public and private sectors will be involved in early discussions to input into the proposed Delivery Programme.
How to comment
Over recent months we have engaged with a range of stakeholders to discuss how the guidance on planning obligations could be improved. We are now issuing this guidance as a draft for comment, to check that it is clearly written and provides appropriate advice.
Please send any comments to Planning.Obligations@gov.scot no later than 30 September 2025.
Please use the same email address if you would like to arrange a discussion on the draft guidance.
If you wish to suggest alternative wording, this can be submitted as a Word document with tracked changes, but please also provide an explanation of the reasons for the proposed change. This will help us to identify if respondents propose a number of different ways to express the same idea.
We do not intend to publish the comments submitted, but please be aware that responses may be subject to Freedom of Information requests.
Directorate for Planning, Architecture and Regeneration
June 2025