Developer Contributions Supplementary Guidance

The guidance is intended to provide planning officers and applicants with as much certainty as possible to work out a development’s likely contribution towards infrastructure so that these can be taken into account early in the proposal assessment.  

However, there will always be a need to review and assess the impact of development on existing infrastructure, the impact of development and whether negative impacts need to be mitigated for the development to be acceptable in planning terms, and to review the costs at the point of assessment of a submitted planning application.  

The provisions in the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 do not allow for the preparation of statutory supplementary guidance after the end of March 2025. Due to the timing of the preparation of this guidance, it will not be possible to review or update this SG. The appendices to this SG provide the estimated costs and the proportionate cost calculation. It is anticipated that updates to costs or funding, when and by whom they will be delivered, will be made in the Action (Delivery) Programme. This will allow costs to be reappraised (for example to reflect costs derived from project level work) and potentially an opportunity to change any actions where significant changes in circumstances have occurred. It is not anticipated that the zones in the Appendices will need to be amended. However, there may be circumstances where the zones need to be amended for example to reflect a change in school catchment area. The supporting paragraph 3.213 relating to Policy Inf 3 allows for the approach described above: Other details on the delivery of the actions (proposals in Tables 3-12) regarding timing, updates to costs or funding, how and by whom they will be delivered, will be provided in updates to the Plan’s action programme and subsequent delivery programme.