News on North Ayrshire’s third Local Development Plan

A key aim of the third Local Development Plan will be to support local living. Local living and 20-minute neighbourhoods can help to deliver the healthy, sustainable, and resilient places required to support a good quality of life and balance our environmental impact. The Local Living and 20-minute neighbourhood concepts aim to create places where people can meet the majority of their daily needs within a reasonable distance of their home, by walking, wheeling or cycling.

Local living provides people with the opportunity to meet the majority of their daily needs within a reasonable distance of their home.

The 20-minute neighbourhood concept is one method of supporting local living. The 20-minute neighbourhoods concept aims to provide access to the majority of daily needs within a 20-minute walk, wheel or cycle.

Research into 20-minute neighbourhoods in a Scottish context identified the opportunity for the concept to support:

Places with high quality housing, the right local infrastructure, good access to services, employment, education, and sustainable travel options can help to break cycles of disadvantage and poverty, promote healthy lifestyles and support physical and mental wellbeing. They can also help to build thriving local economies and support community wealth building, strengthening local resilience as well as playing an important role in supporting environmental sustainability.

Research shows that 20 minutes (roughly 10 minutes out and the same to return home) is generally the threshold time-period that people are willing to walk to access key destinations. The distance covered in a 20-minute round trip, by walking, will vary according to multiple conditions and factors. The quality of surrounding environment, the different circumstances, age and ability of individuals and their communities, the location, and the topography, are contributory factors in the distance people are willing or able to travel actively to access service.

In rural and island settings, where the geographical context is complex and varied, the aspiration and focus needs to be on enabling people to have access to the services, amenities and facilities needed for a full life. The 20 minutes should not be considered as the defining or limiting factor in for local living in any context but as a useful gauge of the aspiration around access and proximity to services within a neighbourhood to enable people to live well locally.

Local living and 20-minute neighbourhoods are not restrictive on people’s behaviour and are simply a way of supporting and encouraging communities to access more of their daily needs locally, enabling healthy and sustainable lifestyles.

A Local Living Framework diagram has been developed to provide a consistent structure to consider local living and the daily needs in a place. The framework sets out 14 key themes, derived from the Place Standard tool – the same tool we have used to create our survey on Your Place. The local living framework diagram was developed to support and encourage flexible, place-based approachs when considering the daily needs in a place that supports local living - whilst avoiding tick box approaches. Five overarching categories as the key considerations for local living have been created, the categories are:

To read more on Local Living and 20-minute neighbourhoods view the guidance published by the Scottish Government. The Scottish Government is currently seeking views on it’s drafted guidance on local living and 20-minute neighbourhoods to support the implementation of National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4). To respond to the consultation please visit the Scottish Government webpage.