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POLICY CONTEXT
1. This Scottish Planning Policy ( SPP) is the Executive's policy on land use planning for waste management and replaces NPPG 10: Planning and Waste Management. The SPP will ensure that planning authorities provide for new waste management installations in their development plans and assist in their role in helping to further the National Waste Plan's objectives in relation to sustainable waste management. The SPP will help achieve compliance with environmental legislation on waste management and with EC Directives. It will be taken into account by Scottish Ministers in their statutory functions in the development plan process, underpinned by Strategic Environmental Assessment. The SPP also reflects the requirement for the storage and treatment of low level radioactive waste in line with recent UK policy 1.
2. The Scottish Ministers are committed to improving Scotland's waste management record. Policy on waste management is driven by a range of initiatives and EC Directives including new targets and improved standards set out in the National Waste Plan 2 and in the Pollution Prevention and Control (Scotland) Regulations. The preferred options in the waste hierarchy 3 are to prevent, reuse and recycle or otherwise recover value from waste before disposal. To help meet some of our domestic and EU targets, the Scottish Executive's Strategic Waste Fund supports local authorities' efforts to reduce municipal waste, to recycle and compost waste and to divert waste away from landfill. Despite efforts to reduce waste however, it is clear that new waste management installations will still be needed to meet statutory requirements set out in the Waste Management Licensing Regulations 1994, by the Landfill Directive targets and the Landfill (Scotland) Regulations 2003. Higher standards at landfill sites, and the UK Government's Landfill Tax, are encouraging the move away from landfill. That increases the need for other forms of waste management infrastructure to treat commercial, industrial and municipal waste. The challenge for planning is to identify locations for the required installations - crucial to Scotland's prosperity and environmental record.
PLANNING WHITE PAPER AND THE PLANNING ETC (SCOTLAND) ACT 2006
3. The Executive is modernising Scotland's planning system to strengthen involvement of communities, speed up decisions, reflect local views better and allow quicker investment decisions. Proposals for modernisation reinforce the primacy of development plans so that development takes place in the context of a long-term and inclusive vision for the future. Effective development planning should contribute to the objective of sustainable development, taking account of the relationship between economic, social and environmental priorities. The Executive's White Paper on planning reform: Modernising the Planning System (2005) recognised the importance of waste management facilities and that they could be considered national or major developments 4. Planning reform aims to address the difficulties faced in delivering infrastructure through improved performance in development planning and management, while providing open accountable decisions that reflect community interests. These new procedures should aid the delivery of large installations some of which may be supported by the Strategic Waste Fund 5. Following consultation, major developments will be defined by secondary legislation. Research on permitted development rights published in March 2007 6 recommends, among other things, permitted development rights in relation to waste developments which will be considered by the Scottish Executive in its review of permitted development rights generally.
4. The European and Scottish policy context for effective waste management planning for new infrastructure is set out in the table annexed to this SPP. Implementation and outcomes described in the last column of the table are specified elsewhere in the SPP or require action by planning authorities.
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