What is Community Planning?

Community planning is about how public bodies work together with local communities, businesses and voluntary groups to plan, design and deliver better services that make a real difference to people's lives.

In Scotland, Community Planning aims to: make sure people and communities are genuinely engaged in the decisions made on public services which affect them; and, ensure a commitment from organisations to work together, not apart, in providing better public services.

There are 32 Community Planning Partnerships [CPP] in Scotland, covering each local authority area and for each CPP a number of public bodies are statutory partners. CPPs and community planning partners must act to secure the participation of communities throughout. This means CPPs must take all reasonable steps to secure the involvement in community planning of any community body which is likely to be able to contribute to it, to the extent that the community body wishes. They must in particular have regard to community bodies which represent those communities experiencing socio-economic disadvantage.

Effective engagement with communities is at the heart of Community Planning. There is no restriction on the type of community, they can be linked to a place or can be a community of interest, for example young people. Information from engagement feeds in to the planning and delivery of public services, making them more responsive to the needs of users and communities.