Craig McLaren was conferred to the Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences in spring 2025. He is Scotland’s first National Planning Improvement Champion, based in the Improvement Service. This role is established in planning legislation to monitor the performance of planning authorities and support their improvement. It has led to the development of a National Planning Improvement Framework based around 12 attributes of a high performing planning authority.
Craig McLarenFAcSS
Craig was Director of Scotland, Ireland and English Regions in the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) and built evidence bases to successfully lobby for the introduction of statutory Chief Planning Officers in Scotland and for a purpose of planning. He led on research connecting spatial planning and community planning, on planning skills, behaviours and knowledge to deliver outcomes, and the demands on and resources of planning services.
Craig also secured a partnership with the Scottish Government to analyse the economic value of digital planning and assess the readiness of planning authorities to support a capacity building programme. He established the Scottish Centre for Regeneration in Communities Scotland/ Scottish Government that developed the Learning in Regeneration Skills Framework, a skills and competency framework for the range of professions and disciplines involved in regeneration.
Craig is a Fellow of both the RTPI and the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), and an Academician of the Academy of Urbanism. He has sat on the Boards of Scotland’s Towns Partnership, Built Environment Forum Scotland, Greenspace Scotland and Resilient Scotland. He regularly gives evidence to the Scottish Parliament and has sat on Scottish Government advisory groups including the High Level Group on Planning Performance, Digital Planning Transformation Programme Board, Joint Housing Policy and Delivery Strategy group, Ministerial Advisory Group on the Crown Estate, Climate Change Plan Stakeholder Group, National Planning Framework 3 Advisory Group and Ministerial Reference Group on Community Empowerment Bill.
Why do the social sciences matter?
The social sciences bring integrity in working out how best to tackle the issues we face as society. Those working in social science need to deal with complex systems and complicated relationships and dependencies. Making sense of this and bringing clarity to how to tackle various societal issues is at the core of creating the conditions for a better quality of life.
What do you enjoy most about your work?
I love working with people to constructively discuss the challenges we face and to explore solutions, built upon evidence and intelligence. This is based around the need to strive for the common good, given that my work is framed by the legal purpose of planning to manage the development and use of land in the long-term public interest. This is especially important in the planning profession where decisions can often be contested and where evidence is heavily scrutinised. Bringing people together to explore how to create better places can be a very positive and rewarding.
What is the most urgent issue social scientists need to tackle today and within the next three years?
I think we need to reassert the importance of evidence-based decision making. We need to show why it is important, the value that it brings and how it can help us to provide the right – or at least best available – way to tackle the complex issues affecting society. This can help us to explore how we can get better at policymaking that looks to the long term rather than short term fixes. As part of this I believe that we need to do more to design our approaches and services around people and support them through taking place-based approaches that meet their needs rather than that of service providers.
What does being a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences mean to you?
It is a personal honour to have been nominated and elected by my peers who bring so much expertise and intelligence to the field. I am also very pleased to see planning and the built environment being recognised as an important part of social science. The breadth and depth of Fellows’ wisdom will undoubtedly support my efforts to create better places for people. I am looking forward to future opportunities to learn from, and to collaborate with, them to tackle the complex issues we all face.