North Ayrshire has been at the forefront of community development in placemaking for many years, from grassroots initiatives like Beith Community Development Trust’s Geilsland Estate to the local authority’s early adoption of community wealth-building.  But, as is so often the case, community-led and public sector regeneration tend to be like ships that pass in the night: they seem to exist in two parallel universes.

To tackle that situation, local community organisations and the local authority have spent the last two years working together to chart a new future for the Garnock Valley. Graham Ross of Austin-Smith:Lord and I had the privilege of being involved throughout, and I’m lucky enough to still be involved in supporting collaborative delivery of the plan.

The result of that two years’ work is the Garnock Valley Place Plan.  It is simultaneously a Local Place Plan, a Community Action Plan and a Locality Plan.  Cutting through that jargon, what that means is a community-led plan with community aspirations at its heart, facilitated and supported by the local authority, which covers multiple agendas - not just planning, economic development or health, for example, but every aspect of what makes a place successful. If you’re familiar with the Scottish Government’s Place Principle, the idea was to put that into practice.

It’s not the first time that a local authority has resourced a community-led plan.  But there are few, if any, examples where that is backed up by public sector support for both planning and delivery.  That alone makes it worthy of the recent special award.

Let’s unpack the approach a little more to see what learning points there might be for other places.

Collaboration needs trust, which takes time to build.  Low levels of trust between communities and government are endemic everywhere and won’t be fixed overnight.  In the Garnock Valley, it took a year of planning and discussion between community organisations and the local authority before any wider community engagement took place - time that was spent building trust by working out how best to go about the work.  Whilst it might be tempting to reduce this vital preparation time, experience elsewhere suggests that there are no shortcuts.  Everyone has to buy into the agreed process and feel part of it.

As part of that year-long preparation period, we spent a lot of time researching previous work.  Community groups were very clear that the many previous studies and consultations done in the Garnock Valley, as a “deprived” area in terms of SIMD and child poverty, needed to feed into the plan rather than starting from scratch again. So we created an online library of over 20 documents from the previous decade, some of which were not previously in the public domain.  They contained projects and proposals, many still relevant, as well as valuable research and consultation results. It sounds an obvious thing to do, but how often does that happen?

Throughout the whole two year process of preparing the plan, public sector support was a constant.  A working group of local community organisations met every month to oversee community engagement and preparation of the plan; they were supported and facilitated by local authority regeneration, community development and planning officers, augmented with specialist expertise in design and community-led planning.  “Professionals on tap, not on top” could have been the motto.

That local authority support has continued since the plan was completed in Summer 2025, as the community-led working group evolves into a new community-led delivery organisation to champion implementation of the plan.  Everyone is conscious that without that support, the plan would be likely to sit on a shelf - one of the unfortunate lessons from the Scottish Government’s charrette programme which ran through the 2010s, and which has formed a foundation for development of more deeply-rooted community-led work like Local Place Plans.  In the Garnock Valley, that has meant putting community bodies in the driving seat, with professionals and the local authority there to support.

That highlights another lesson from the Garnock Valley work: the importance of putting in place delivery mechanisms as part of the planning process.  Creating a smooth transition from planning to delivery has been an important part of the overall approach.

Consideration of delivery started many months before the plan was completed.  That meant that when the plan was finished, staff time was already in place to support its delivery until well into 2026, with more resources coming onstream early in 2026 including a dedicated development worker who will be managed by local community groups.  The local community and local authority are now collaborating on a concerted period of prioritising, building capacity, action planning and seeking funding to implement the Plan. This needs great focus and effort straight after the plan’s completion, but it’s important not to be overwhelmed and take on too much too soon.  Rome wasn’t built in a day, was it?

It hasn’t all been plain sailing.  There are things we could and would do better if we had our time again.  For example, we would have more sustained engagement with the local private and social enterprise sector - although key local businesses were engaged early on in the preparation of the plan, we need to re-engage those businesses now because their collaboration is critical to delivery of the plan. 

Similarly, although we held sessions in schools and the local Youth Forum were members of the working group throughout the plan’s preparation, deeper engagement with young people would have enabled the plan to include more specific actions relating to young people’s futures in the Garnock Valley - where child poverty rates are among the highest in Scotland.

After two years of hard work, there is strong commitment from community groups and the local authority to implement the plan.  2026 will be crucial: we need to still be around in 12 months’ time and have positive stories of success to share.  We don’t yet know what they will be, but we’re all positive because momentum is with us.

So, check back on our progress in a year’s time at www.ourgarnockvalley.net.  In the meantime, visit that site to find out more about how we’ve gone about collaborative planning and implementation in line with the Place Principle - and let us know what you think.