Consultation on East Lothian Open Space Strategy Refresh 2025

What is an Open Space Strategy?

An Open Space Strategy sets out proposals for the development, maintenance and use of open spaces in a local authority’s area, and proposals to meet future need and demand. Preparing an Open Space Strategy is a statutory duty on local authorities under the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 (opens in new window), and it must be taken into consideration in the Local Development Planning process.

East Lothian Council already has an existing East Lothian Open Space Strategy 2018 (opens in new window) in place, which was approved by Cabinet in 2018. It set out objectives and actions for the provision and management of open space and established open space standards to ensure suitable future open space provision through the development planning process. This now requires to be refreshed and updated.

What does the East Lothian Open Space Strategy include?

For this updated East Lothian Open Space Strategy we have visited 456 publicly accessible open spaces and greenspaces in towns and villages across East Lothian, and undertaken detailed audits of them all – both Council owned/managed and privately owned/managed open spaces, within and on the edge of settlements. Many of these are new open spaces developed since the last East Lothian Open Space Strategy in 2018.

We have followed the Scottish Government’s draft regulations on Open Space Strategies (opens in new window) in focusing on open spaces over 0.2 hectares in size, plus other smaller urban open spaces that have important functions locally, such as civic squares in town centres and neighbourhood playspaces.

We have analysed the audit information we collected to present our draft findings on the

• Quantity
• Quality, and
• Accessibility

of East Lothian’s open spaces across our towns and villages.

We present our initial findings on the following pages, and we are keen to hear your views.