Twenty of the 24 community energy meetings identified by the Scottish Government over a 12-month period came from a single offshore-wind consultation.
The record shows that Scotland has machinery for consulting communities about individual plans, but no continuing national system is identified for hearing what happens when several energy projects converge on the same place.
An Environmental Information response published on 23 July 2026 recorded 24 meetings involving representatives of Scottish communities and members of the Government, including ministers and cabinet secretaries.
Twenty were public events connected to the draft updated Sectoral Marine Plan for Offshore Wind Energy. The remaining four comprised one meeting involving the Deputy First Minister and the Scottish Seabird Centre and three discussions between planning officials and the manager of the East Lammermuir Energy Projects Partnership.
The figures do not suggest that consultation failed to take place. Seventeen events were held in person around Scotland between June and August 2025, with three further sessions conducted online.
They do, however, show that the Government’s record of engagement was concentrated within one time-limited exercise concerned with offshore wind planning.
A formal consultation allows people to respond to a defined proposal before a deadline. It does not necessarily provide a continuing route through which residents can raise problems as plans change, construction begins or additional infrastructure is proposed.
A coastal or rural community may first encounter an offshore wind development through a national marine plan. The seabed lease is handled separately by Crown Estate Scotland. Individual wind farms then proceed through consenting, while converter stations, substations, overhead lines, cable routes, port works and road alterations may each require further decisions by different bodies.
Every process can be valid in its own terms while leaving no single institution responsible for hearing what the combined change means locally.
The consultation behind 20 of the meetings ran from 30 May to 22 August 2025. It considered a draft spatial-planning framework covering the ScotWind and Innovation and Targeted Oil and Gas leasing rounds, together with possible test and demonstration projects.
The plan and its assessments considered up to 37.4GW of generation capacity across 32 offshore option areas. The Scottish Government described its purpose as balancing economic, social and environmental objectives through a national planning framework for offshore wind development.
The scale of that exercise helps explain why events were held from the Northern Isles to the west coast and the east of Scotland.
It also means the 20 meetings cannot safely be treated as evidence of equally broad engagement across every part of the energy system. They were all generated by the same consultation, took place within the same three-month period and dealt with the same national planning document.
The consultation received 304 formal responses, of which 234 came from individuals and 70 from organisations. The organisations included councils, community councils, developers, public bodies and groups representing fisheries, conservation, tourism and other marine interests.
The analysis recorded recurring calls for stronger local representation, greater transparency and independent oversight. When respondents were asked whether existing bodies or new groups should oversee implementation of the plan, 94 favoured new groups, compared with 33 who preferred existing arrangements. A further 57 said they did not know.
Those responses point to a concern extending beyond whether the public was invited to a meeting. Communities were questioning how they would remain involved after consultation ended and decisions moved into separate planning, leasing and consenting systems.
The public events also produced markedly different levels of attendance.
Some drew substantial local interest, while others attracted very few people. The published consultation material recorded no public attendees at the Thurso event and only small numbers at several other locations. Larger audiences attended sessions in places including Lerwick and Pittenweem.
Low attendance does not prove indifference. It may reflect timing, notice, travel, confidence in the process or the difficulty of understanding how a national marine plan will eventually affect a particular community.
Nor does attendance by itself ensure that what people say becomes part of the formal decision-making record.
The consultation accepted responses through the Government’s Citizen Space platform, by email and in hard copy. Those formal submissions were then analysed independently. Discussions held during public events helped officials understand local concerns, but attending and speaking at a session was not the same as lodging a formal consultation response through the prescribed process.
That procedural difference can matter to people who reasonably believe that speaking directly to officials has placed their concern on the record.
The four meetings outside the marine-plan consultation provide a different picture of government engagement.
East Lammermuir has faced a concentration of proposed energy infrastructure in a relatively small part of East Lothian. Planning officials met the area’s Energy Projects Partnership manager three times to discuss information sharing and ways of improving coordination between developments.
The meetings suggest recognition of a problem that is becoming more common: communities are being asked to understand connected infrastructure through documents produced by different companies and considered under separate procedures.
One developer may consult on an offshore wind farm, another on a transmission line and a third on a substation or battery facility. The physical relationship between those projects may be obvious to residents, even where the statutory system treats them individually.
The Scottish Government has previously attempted to improve community involvement through guidance rather than legislation.
Its first Good Practice Principles for community benefits from onshore renewable energy were published in 2014 and updated in 2019. The guidance encouraged developers to begin discussions early, identify appropriate communities and consider how benefit arrangements might work alongside other developments in the area.
Community-benefit payments remain voluntary and legally separate from planning decisions. They cannot be used as a reason to grant consent or treated as compensation for accepting a project.
By February 2026, the Government was proposing another overhaul. Its working paper suggested extending the guidance to energy-storage developments, addressing projects that share sites or grid connections, strengthening governance and creating a Community Benefit Peer Forum and toolkit.
That evolution reflects how much the development landscape has changed since the original principles were written.
A community may now be dealing with wind generation, battery storage, transmission infrastructure and associated road or port works at the same time. Separate benefit funds, consultation teams and application boundaries can make it difficult to establish which organisation is responsible for the wider consequences.
The Government’s second information response illustrates another limitation.
A search found no meetings between ministers and community representatives about individual planning applications during the relevant year. The Government said such discussions would generally be inappropriate because ministers may later have a formal decision-making role and must avoid prejudicing live or forthcoming cases.
That safeguard is necessary. A minister who may determine an application should not privately discuss its merits with one side.
It can nevertheless leave communities without an obvious route for raising concerns that are broader than one application.
Residents may not be asking a minister to approve or reject a particular development. They may be trying to explain that several schemes together are placing pressure on roads, housing, public services, crofting land, fishing activity or local confidence in the planning system.
Those concerns can fall between institutions. A marine-planning team considers the offshore framework. A council examines local planning matters. Energy-consent officials assess major electricity infrastructure. Developers conduct their own engagement, while community-benefit negotiations take place outside the consent decision.
The risk is that government receives several technically complete accounts of individual projects but no complete account of what one place is being asked to carry.
The 24 disclosed meetings demonstrate that officials conducted a geographically extensive offshore-wind consultation and maintained limited contact with several organisations outside it.
They do not show a permanent national system through which communities affected by overlapping energy infrastructure can raise cumulative concerns after a consultation closes.
As Scotland moves from setting energy ambitions to constructing the equipment needed to deliver them, the weakness may become increasingly visible. National plans can identify capacity, developers can progress individual projects and regulators can examine each application, while the lived consequences accumulate in a small number of communities.
The public record currently counts meetings. It does not yet show who is responsible for joining the separate conversations together.
Sources
Scottish Government — Draft Updated Sectoral Marine Plan For Offshore Wind Energy 2025
Scottish Government Consultation Hub — Draft Updated Sectoral Marine Plan For Offshore Wind Energy
