Church closures are continuing apace in Scotland, potentially leading to losses of heritage and community spaces. One third of Scotland’s churches are due to close by 2030, with some holding their last services this past Christmas. To tackle this issue, Research in Action on Church Heritage (ReACH) (the new name for Finding Futures for Scotland’s Churches) launched last year. Since the project’s inception, the team has grown and we’ve been hard at work on the data, conducting site visits, and fostering sector-wide collaboration to deal with the urgent challenge to Scotland’s ecclesiastical heritage.

In September, we publicly launched ReACH with a symposium in Edinburgh and online. The event featured 20 lightning talks from people with a wide range of expertise across the sector, including speakers from heritage bodies, museums, and academia. Together, we got a kaleidoscopic impression of the treasures encompassed by Scottish churches, from medieval tombs to Gaelic psalm singing, modernist architecture to early modern Covenanting banners. A roundtable discussion with speakers from Historic Environment Scotland, Historic Churches Scotland, and the University of Stirling rounded off a day full of conversations which highlighted shared challenges and opportunities for the future of church buildings, as well as the importance of working together to preserve their material and social heritage.

The collective will to meet the current challenges head on is truly heartening, and we’re actively working with other groups to make sure efforts aren’t duplicated and that we’re all sharing our information and expertise. As part of this, we’ve set up a Heritage Action Group. This group will shape the ReACH project’s work, contribute to our data collection, and assist in us providing support to churches who would like help in celebrating their heritage. The membership of the group is open to anyone who feels they have something to contribute. To request an invitation to our next meeting, email churches@socantscot.org.

To get a better sense of the issues facing communities dealing with the closure of their churches, the team have been on visits to churches in Burntisland, Crail, St Monan’s, Inverness, Kirkmichael, and Cromarty. All of these communities are at different stages of their journey, and we were pleased to hear that St Monan’s has since successfully received funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund to ensure its sustainable future. We also undertook our first pilot studies at Inverness Old High Kirk and Whitekirk, East Lothian, trialling our methods for recording both the tangible heritage and the intangible social value of churches.

Perhaps the biggest task for the team is creating a database which records the heritage of Scotland’s 860+ churches at risk of closure. This will allow us to get a bird’s-eye view of the situation, so that we can prioritise particular churches for further research and support. We’re beginning the process of data collection to record and build a clearer picture of the heritage which exists in Scotland’s church buildings, starting with pulling existing data about these at-risk churches together into one place. We’re really grateful to groups such as Scottish Church Heritage Research (who manage the PoWiS database) Scottish Stained Glass Trust, the Pictish Arts Society, and Sowne of Organe for already offering to share their resources with the project.  Creating a public record of what we may be losing is an important, but sometimes sobering, task— especially when almost every week we hear of another church closing its doors to the public, or put up for sale. All of the information we collect will be made publicly accessible on our website. Everyone – heritage bodies, church communities, academics, enthusiasts – will be able to use the information and images to better understand, plan and prioritise the protection of heritage at risk. It will also showcase the brilliance of Scotland’s church heritage.

As ReACH progresses, we aim to continue building connections between research and practice, supporting the people and places that make up Scotland’s rich ecclesiastical heritage.

To keep up with everything happening as part of the project, please visit our new website, which will act as a home for our church heritage database, resources and blog posts. You can also follow the project on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Instagram, and Facebook (@churchheritage) or sign up to our e-newsletter here.

Dr Emily Johnston FSAScot is ReACH’s Communities Officer. She joined the team in August 2025 after her PhD at the University of Edinburgh, specialising in community engagement in archaeology. Dr Lizzie Swarbrick is the Research Manager for ReACH and is an art and architectural historian, specialising in Scottish medieval churches. ReACH is a Society of Antiquaries of Scotland project in partnership with Scotland’s Churches Trust, funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Pilgrim Trust.

This blog is part of the fourth edition of the Places of Worship Forum (POWF) Newsletter which was published on 9th February 2026. The newsletter aims to share the ongoing work of the group. Would you like to receive the next edition of the newsletter? Sign up here. 

Across the Joining the Dots series, the common themes of complexity and fragmentation in the policy landscapes raises its head time and time again. For the skills policy environment, it is no different. In fact, it could be suggested that as we accelerate towards net zero, grapple with housing pressures, and seek to build climate resilient, thriving places – an available, skilled, adaptable and engaged workforce is not only critical but foundational to success. Practitioners across Scotland are already feeling the pressure to deliver retrofit, low carbon housing, resilient infrastructure and heritage-sensitive upgrades at pace.  However, across policy areas, skills are too often treated as operational details rather than strategic enablers. 

Yet, recent sector reviews and discussion papers frames skills as central to our net zero, housing, infrastructure, heritage, planning and placemaking ambitions, urging coordinated action across all policy landscapes to avoid leaving communities behind – stressing that skills are not an add-on but a delivery mechanism for policy goals – to be resilient and sustain growth in the future – an available, skilled, adaptable and engaged workforce is critical.  

It will always be a challenge to ensure that qualifications are current and relevant to the evolving workplace. Skills requirements within occupations change faster than the pace of standards development, qualification design, and processes to agree funding. However, it is crucial that we see these signals as an opportunity to translate such indicators into co-ordinated investment, procurement reform and regional scalable training that secures Scotland’s built environment for the long term i.e. accelerate Net Zero, improve housing quality and deliver a fair Just Transition.  

So, how do skills connect to policy objectives? 

Scotland’s built environment ambitions depend on a workforce equipped with retrofit, low carbon, and heritage–sensitive skills, allied to the need to develop digital skills to meet future challenges and support decarbonisation targets.  

Net Zero delivery hinges on retrofit capacity, low-carbon materials knowledge and low-emission installation skills; without these, emissions targets and housing decarbonisation will stall. Housing construction needs contractors and professionals able to work either delivering urban and/or rural stock while meeting energy efficiency goals.  Infrastructure and climate resilience demand engineers and planners versed in resilient design and whole life carbon assessment.  

Built heritage requires conservation skills that can be reconciled with repair, maintenance, new build, decarbonisation and retrofit approaches without damaging historic fabric. Procurement and placemaking are levers to embed skills development through social value, community engagement and local supply chain requirements.  

Whilst these linkages have been well documented, the current skills policies landscape is “hamstrung” with multiple overlapping roles, funding models, and delivery mechanisms creating confusion for users and undermining system effectiveness. This has been shaped by decades of institutional change, constrained by devolution, and shifting governmental priorities. Add Scotland’s lack of a coherent national skills strategy, which has led to competing narratives, duplication of efforts, and a failure to establish clear accountability or shared measures of success.  Such a “wicked problem” requires innovative, cohesive systems thinking. 

We need to shine a light on the importance of skills policies that are both integrated and place-based. This means linking skills development with broader local strategies for job quality improvements, housing, transport, and innovation support.  Therefore, as a sector to address the apparent skills policy inertia, we need to aim to offer a more nuanced view of what works and what needs improvement. All of us need to be aware that each gap not only maps to a strategic objective but also presents windows of opportunity to translate recent skills policy signals and industry missions into coordinated investment, procurement reform, and regional scalable training that secures Scotland’s built environment for the long term.  

So, what are the key skills policy gaps and tensions? 

I believe there are six key gaps and tensions: 

• Insufficient cross–sector workforce planning: Siloed portfolios (housing, transport, heritage, infrastructure, etc.) miss opportunities for shared training hubs and transferable credentials. 

• Fragmented policy alignment and training pathways: Retrofit, planning, procurement, and skills strategies frequently operate in parallel rather than in an integrated way, creating delivery gaps and missed opportunities for scale. 

• Regional disconnects and insufficient training capacity: Disparities in institutional capacity, especially between urban and rural areas, hinder equitable access to the provision of high-quality skills and alignment with local needs, limiting local pipelines for craft apprenticeships and professional roles. 

• Procurement misalignment: Current commissioning models often favour short–term cost savings (lowest capital cost) over whole–life value or workforce development, undermining demand for skills. 

• Innovation skills shortfall: Uptake of offsite manufacture, Building Information Modelling and circular practices is constrained by digital and manufacturing skills gaps 

• Built Heritage marginalisation: Traditional skills are frequently viewed as niche, rather than mainstream and important contributors to net zero, placemaking, and economic resilience. 

Without concrete policy alignment across skills, procurement, planning, infrastructure, repair, and climate programs, the parallel ambitions of built environment decarbonisation, housing resilience, and regional planning cannot be met without coordinated action on skills. We must look to tackle these tensions from a first-principles-thinking perspective if we truly want to challenge the status quo.  

Strategic Opportunities 

To close that gap, I would like to offer policymakers and sector leaders 5 key actions to prioritise: 

• Undertake robust policy evaluations:  We have a diluted understanding of what and how well skills interventions work and of determining the most effective way to increase skills levels and reduce unemployment 

• Reform procurement and incentivise: Move to value–based procurement frameworks that explicitly reward provision of training, knowledge transfer, innovative approaches, and alignment with local needs (climate resilience, built heritage and circular economy, supply chain engagement, employment and skills outcomes) 

• Fund regional training hubs: Invest in place–based centres that can be replicated regionally to scale prioritising communities affected by the transition, and to mainstream new competencies, and link schools, colleges, and employers to create clear career pathways and retain talent locally.  

• Create a National Built Environment Skills Framework: Standardise cross–sector credentials and enable portability between construction and infrastructure roles.  Also look to introduce stackable industry recognised micro credentials that allow workers to upskill incrementally (e.g., retrofit installer → low carbon systems specialist). 

• Embed cross–sector governance: Establish a convening mechanism that brings together skills bodies, local authorities, and industry to align targets and funding. 

These are not new or groundbreaking opportunities, but they are foundational to a resilient, sustainable built environment sector.  

Final Thought 

We already have new innovative centres of practice in the pipeline, such as Lock 16 – Scotland’s Centre of Excellence for Canals & Traditional Skills, Retrofit Scotland and Highlands and Islands Skills centre of Excellence for Skills, Safety and Innovation. 

We cannot afford to rest, we must be bold, coordinate action now, through systemic strategic collaboration, innovation, and transformation, and turn the current skills policy landscape from a constraint into Scotland’s built environment’s competitive advantage.  Ultimately, we must treat Scotland’s skills policy as strategic infrastructure, to allow us to indeed convert gaps, opportunities and policy signals into coordinated meaningful action.

At the end of 2025 Built Environment Forum Scotland facilitated a focused workshop  as part of the Scottish Castles Association’s conference ‘Scotland’s Castles: Use Them or Lose Them‘, held at the Engine Shed in Stirling. 

The events, held on the on 9-10 October 2025, brought together stakeholders from across the heritage sector to explore how the planning system can effectively support the restoration and reuse of Scotland’s historic castles and related buildings. The conference featured keynote speakers from Historic Environment Scotland, the National Trust for Scotland, the Landmark Trust, and the King’s Foundation, alongside restorers, planners, conservation professionals and building owners. 

Following the conference, BEFS was invited to facilitate a workshop with a smaller group to build on the conference discussions and reach consensus on the key principles and practical steps for action. Participants identified several priority areas, including the need for consistent planning guidance, alongside signposting to accessible information for potential buyers, practical case study sharing, and front-loaded pre-application support for prospective owners. 

The workshop outcomes highlighted that what is needed is not new standardised policy, but better sharing of existing information, evidence-based solutions, and practical tools such as route maps and resource toolkits to help navigate the planning process. 

BEFS looks forward to working with the Scottish Castles Association on emerging recommendations and next steps. 

Read the full outcomes report here.

I started the year and this series by asking ‘How can strategic advocacy be amplified through joined-up thinking and cross-sector collaboration, towards legislation that delivers for our people and places?’. A big question. 

And the big conversations we, as a sector, have been having throughout 2025 have shown some encouraging common themes emerging. With their excellent and thought provoking contributions, the authors of Joining the Dots blogs over the past 12 months have explored the need for breaking down silos and embracing a whole systems approach to policy. This includes how work on the ground must be recognised as contributing to Scotland’s overarching goals such as Net Zero, and the transformative benefits that integrated and available data can and should have for people and places. 

 BEFS Membership and the wider ‘sector’ is broad; finding a common hymn sheet to sing from is often far from straightforward. But when the conversations are generous, collegiate, and strategic we can, and do, achieve much together.  Further, knowing who is doing what, and where, presents opportunities for identifying commonality and consensus across seeming disparate areas of specific interest; such as across Culture and Heritage, the Climate Emergency and Net Zero, Repair, Maintenance and Retrofit, Training and Skills, and Planning and Placemaking- the main themes in BEFS Manifesto 2026. 

 These conversations have helped BEFS in presenting what we believe to be a reflection of a truly cross-sectoral ask. This helps to clearly make the case for how investment is key to unlocking substantial value for public money and driving progress across vital public policy portfolios. It is a call to action for the next Scottish Government, and we need to make our message as simple as possible; without recognising and leveraging the benefits brought by the sustainable use of Scotland’s historic and existing built assets, critical climate and wellbeing targets will not be met. You can’t do this without us! 

Demonstrating value: 

BEFS five main Manifesto policy areas are designed to demonstrate how joined up and strategic investment will contribute materially towards the long-term benefit of Scotland’s people and places. This diagram shows how these can be read against Scotland’s national outcomes.  

It has also often been noted that de-mystifying the policy landscape is one of the keys to successful joined-up thinking and action. To help with this, BEFS 2025 Policy Map is a useful tool, demonstrating some of the essential areas of overlap to push open policy doors and support collective advocacy. Our recently updated Advocacy Toolkit can also help navigate a complex landscape.  

Hitting the ground running in 2026 

We know that as a resilient and innovative sector there is a will and readiness to work together, especially important in this election year, to unlock the value and potential of our shared built heritage. We can support any incoming Government to create the conditions for a well-resourced, dynamic, and effective built and historic environment sector – during and beyond the ebb and flow of parliamentary cycles. 

Looking ahead to March, BEFS team look forward to working with you all, as we plan our pre-election activity and engagement – and explore further how we can help to join the dots in 2026 and in the long term.  

 Get in touch – to find out more about BEFS work or to discuss a particular topic or policy area email us at info@befs.org.uk or contact the Team. 

The former Lansdowne Church in Glasgow’s West end has received substantial funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and  Glasgow City Heritage Trust to undertake an innovative project called ‘Accessing Websters’. The project will be run by the charity FACT THREE and will include an oral history project, outreach events and a new accessible database of known Alf Webster windows.

The building, designed by the Glasgow architect John Honeyman (1831-1914), houses two stained glass windows designed by renowned stained glass artist Alf Webster (1883-1915). The A Listed building, formerly known as Lansdowne Church, now houses the Stand Comedy Club on the ground floor with the stained glass gallery currently under developmentat upper gallery level.

As part of the project a new stained glass museum will be created, which will be dedicated to the research and presentation of the city’s stained glass. We are fortunate in having one of the few UK ICON Accredited Conservator-Restorers, Rab MacInnes, who is  a British Society of Master Glass Painters Member living and working near to the project. He will be working with a team to conserve and reinstate one of Webster’s windows which is currently in storage. With the focus on one of Scotland’s endangered traditional skills, we are also lucky to have one of Historic Environment Scotland’s Stained Glass Craft Fellow, Gordon Muir, working on the team.

The Accessing Websters Project has the promotion of traditional skills at its core. For over three decades Four Acres Charitable Trust and its sister charity FACT THREE  have been supporting the use of traditional skills over several buildings including Lansdowne Church and Cottiers. Work at Cottiers and Websters has provided many opportunities for traditional skills to be passed down to the next generation and new team members. Such skills include slab laying, stone pointing, cutting and indenting stone, mosaic, internal joinery, sheeting, brickwork and blockwork and other aspects of the building trades.

About Webster and the windows

Although Webster’s stained glass career was relatively short in comparison to his contemporaries, through new research, as part of the project, we are discovering that his output was prolific.

Born in Glasgow’s south side in 1883, Webster studied Architecture and Modelling at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) before studying under Stephen Adam Senior (1848-1910) in Adam’s Glasgow studio. During this period, GSA was an exciting place to study with influential individuals such as its architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, artistic tutor the symbolist Jean Delville, Ann Macbeth, Jessie Newbery and Director Fra Newbery studying or teaching there. In 1904, Webster began an apprenticeship at Adam Senior’s studio at 168 Bath Street in the city centre which was known as the ‘Adam Studio’. After Adam’s death in 1910, Webster took over the studio until his death during WWI in 1915.

The McCowan window depicts the events of Holy Week, and consists of three large, detailed lancets and a trefoil situated above. The McCowan window, installed in 1913-14, was the gift of Mr and Mrs David McCowan of 9 Park Circus Place. David McCowan was a senior partner of the marine insurance brokers and underwriting firm, Messrs William Euing & Company.  Although the window is currently in storage awaiting the team to start work, progress has been made with the installation of the light tables in the space designated for the museum.

The second window, commonly referred to as The Templeton building, is still in situ in its original location. Named after the Misses Templeton, who gifted the window, it depicts the life of Christ in eight large scenes with a panel dedicated to the memory of their mother, brother, and sister and in appreciation of their present minister. Misses Templeton was the spinster daughter of James Templeton, a long-serving Manager and Elder of Lansdowne UP Church. Like the McCowan window, the main scenes of the window are surrounded by detailed motifs and symbols.

The Accessing Websters Project will run for two years with the aim of sharing the story and art of Alf Webster through various means. It is hoped that the museum will be open to the public in 2026.

Dr. Karen Mailley has an MA Joint (Hons) and an MLitt in Decorative Arts & Design History from the University of Glasgow. She helped to establish Scotland’s first online stained glass database. Image: Detail of the McCowan Window courtesy of FACT THREE.

This blog is part of the third edition of the Places of Worship Forum (POWF) Newsletter which was published on 12 November 2025. The newsletter aims to share the ongoing work of the group. Would you like to receive the next edition of the newsletter? Sign up here. 

On the high streets of our towns and cities, at the centres of our villages, up country lanes, peppering our coastline – churches are central to Scotland’s built environment. Today, many of these buildings are in peril of closing their doors to the public. Approximately 800 churches in Scotland are either closing or due to close in the next few years, and with 200 closed recently, this amounts to around one third of all Scottish churches. Aiming to address this issue, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and Scotland’s Churches Trust have teamed up for the project Finding Futures for Scotland’s Churches. Thanks to grants from National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Pilgrim Trust, this two-year project will undertake a rapid assessment of Scotland’s at-risk church heritage and social value, and work with others to help communities find sustainable futures for their buildings.

The Challenge   

All denominations are currently grappling with the issue of how to manage their estate at a time when congregations are dwindling. The church closures happening as a result are now proceeding at an unprecedented pace. Most in the built heritage sector will have been touched by the issue, whether formally through their role or simply because they are concerned about a cherished church’s planned closure. Some historically important buildings, such as Fowlis Easter (Scotland’s most complete pre-Reformation Church) and Croick (made famous by the record of the Clearances engraved on its windows) have galvanised support for closing churches, with the former a recent recipient of a grant from Architectural Heritage Fund and the latter acquired by Historic Churches Scotland. The Church of Scotland has also identified twelve ‘Signature Churches’, a scheme aimed at supporting some of their most vibrant and historic churches.

Still, there are hundreds of churches which are at risk. Many are architecturally important, others are like mini museums with important collections, and almost all of them are centres of significant intangible cultural heritage. It is also the case that we simply do not know what we might be losing because Scottish churches have long been undervalued and under-researched. There have already been accidents where historic interiors have been damaged in the closure process, and there is a real risk that we might not know what we’ve got ‘til it’s gone. The Finding Futures for Scotland’s Churches project will create a publicly accessible database to record ecclesiastical heritage and social value, to empower the communities who care for churches and help heritage organisations take a strategic view of the challenges.

The Project

With funding for two years, the project team will undertake a rapid analysis of Scotland’s at-risk ecclesiastical heritage and the social value of churches. There are several existing resources available which survey heritage, such as Historic Environment Scotland’s Trove and specialist databases, for example, of church bells. So, the first job is to collate this data and identify gaps in knowledge. Then comes the tricky task of prioritising churches with particularly high heritage and/or social value to explore in greater depth. We are creating a method of assessment that is transparent, sensitive, and necessarily speedy given the scale of church closures. Ten sites will be chosen for full recording of their heritage using Scotland Churches Trust’s Church Recording scheme as a model, alongside in-depth research and expert advice. Ten churches will also be selected for social value surveys, based on the University of Stirling’s Social Value Toolkit. Throughout, we will engage with affected communities, placing them at the front and centre of all the work we do.

Get Involved

Launched in June 2025, the project is staffed by a Research Manager and a newly-appointed Communities Officer, supported by colleagues in the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and Scotland’s Churches Trust. Collaboration is key, and we are in dialogue with the Church of Scotland, the Sacred Landscapes initiative run by the University of St Andrews, Historic Environment Scotland, National Museums Scotland, and members of the Places of Worship Forum. In particular, we are working closely with the team at Development Trusts Association Scotland who have their own programme ‘New Futures: Former Places of Worship’ focussing on bringing church buildings into sustainable community ownership. We are always keen to find new partners, and we are establishing an action group to contribute to our research and help advise churches on the heritage assets they hold. Please contact lizzie@socantscot.org if you would like to attend our launch event in Edinburgh on the 11^th of September.

To stay abreast of the progress of the project, you can find us on Bluesky @ScotChurchFutures, follow Scotland’s Churches Trust on their social media for updates, and subscribe to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland’s public e-newsletter at www.socantscot.org/enews.

Dr Lizzie Swarbrick FSAScot is the Research Manager for the Finding Futures for Scotland’s Churches project run by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and Scotland’s Churches Trust. Lizzie is an art and architectural historian specialising in Scottish medieval churches, with a particular interest in how people have created, moulded, and used church buildings and their associated material culture. She joined the Society of Antiquaries in June 2025 after a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh and a PhD at the University of St Andrews.

This blog is part of the second edition of the Places of Worship Forum (POWF) Newsletter which was published on 14 August 2025. To read the first edition, please click here. The newsletter aims to share the ongoing work of the group. Would you like to receive the next edition of the newsletter? Sign up here. 

It is now well known that the Church of Scotland (CoS) in particular, is rationalising its estate at pace and our research shows that as many as 800 church assets across Scotland (across all denominations) are potentially up for sale in the next few years. COSS (Community Ownership Support Services) has been supporting groups over the years with their ambitions to bring churches and glebe land into community ownership but to support this unprecedented demand we have now launched a new dedicated support service.  

I am the Churches Advisor covering the North half of Scotland and my colleague Claire Martin, covers the Southern half. A third advisor will also be coming on board shortly as our research shows that demand is due to further increase next year. This research was started by the DTAS (Development Trusts Association Scotland) Research and Insights team and further developed by our new Programme Support Officer, Harry Whitmore. 

Harry is part of our churches team and has been leading on developing an open-source database detailing the status of all Church of Scotland assets from local presbytery plans and other publicly available material on other denominations into one handy searchable document that we can continue to update. This will provide communities and stakeholders with vital information to help them plan support and community action.  

As advisors we will provide dedicated support along with training and guidance to equip communities to make informed decisions on the future of their local church assets, providing the tools for community ownership where appropriate and ensuring communities across Scotland have the support they need. We will also be raising awareness, visiting targeted areas and highlighting to communities the assets that may be being disposed of the support available to them.  So, in summary, our service will, over the next three years provide-  

• early-stage guidance and advice to communities including 1-2-1 Advisor support 

• start up support, mentoring and sharing good practice with groups 

• peer-to-peer networking and learning exchanges 

• help building capacity in community ownership through training workshops, guidance and resources 

• dedicated web pages with digital resources (still to be developed) as well as signposting to other support bodies 

• a ‘Churches SOS’ Crisis Support Service for groups that need to access support quickly to access their options 

• microgrants to groups to set up to hold early-stage community consultation events, print leaflets etc. 

• work with a range of partners and stakeholders to ensure holistic package of support. 

We are also looking forward to continuing our work with BEFS, by co-developing and delivering workshop sessions and exploring how best we can support local authority officers in this fast-paced environment.  

As the programme develops, we will be sharing information and findings with partners across the UK and look forward to working with a variety of stakeholders including those involved in the Places of Worship forum. 

It’s early days and our webpages are still under construction, but we have been busy! Since 2024 the COSS team have been working with over 50 active community groups who are exploring the options available to them and we have launched our first series of online workshops.  The topics so far cover place planning and community engagement delivered in partnership with Coalfields Regeneration Trust and an information session on Community Right to Buy delivered by Scottish Government. The past few months we have delivered workshops such as “Churches into Community Ownership – First steps”, “Finance and Fundraising”, and “Business Planning”.

This three-year project is possible thanks to funding by the National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF) and Historic Environment Scotland (HES) and Development Trust Association Scotland (DTAS). 

Please do share our contact details amongst your network and we very much look forward to hearing from new groups considering taking a former place of worship into community ownership. 

Delivered by the Development Trusts Association Scotland, the Community Ownership Support Service is funded by the Scottish Government to support the sustainable transfer of predominantly public assets into community ownership.   

Audrey Dunn, Churches Advisor at COSS (Community Ownership Support Services) introduces their New Futures Programme – Former places of Worship in Scotland a new initiative dedicated to supporting churches into community ownership. 

This blog is part of the Places of Worship Forum (POWF) Newsletter which launched 3 July 2025. To read the first edition, please click here. The newsletter aims to share the ongoing work of the group. Would you like to receive the next edition of the newsletter? Sign up here. 

In her first Joining the Dots piece, Hazel Johnson said that the policy landscape is complex. I’d like to add to that assessment and suggest that policy complexity is not a static feature – but it’s something that changes over time, as policy develops. Looking at things from planning perspective, the last few years have added new topics, new technologies and new duties to the remit of planners – whether that’s play sufficiency assessments, nature networks, battery storage and hydrogen to name a few. The result is a policy landscape that is complex and dynamic, and trends towards both deepening and broadening.  

As well as increasing numbers of topics, planning now involves many more technical assessments and tools. As a case in point the guidance on NPF4 Policy 2 climate mitigation and adaptation was published very recently, explaining how lifecycle carbon assessments are to be used in the decision-making process. It’s not enough to support renewables and energy efficiency, planners are being asked to consider a technical assessment of lifecycle carbon as part of the planning process.  

These examples are in themselves a form of Joining the Dots – linking national policy goals through to decisions and developments on the ground. And technical assessment is a necessary step in realising those national ambitions. But just adding more work to the system isn’t yet delivering the step change needed. So, what else could be done?  

I want to make the case here for data – and the potential of data integration as a way of joining the dots. As a former (recovering) academic, you might not be surprised that I’m keen on building an evidence base to support all forms of policy development and implementation. There is lots of data out there, but it’s not necessarily in the right places or available in the right formats to make it usable.  

All of us will be aware of reports commissioned at various times and places about biodiversity, ground conditions, archaeology, or something else – but which exist solely in a stand-alone document, possibly in PDF. Local authority planning portals must collectively have thousands of examples of these sitting on the cyber shelves. Many of these provide useful data about individual plots of land and the surrounding neighbourhood – but it’s both inaccessible and invisible in its current format. What if we could make it available and usable?  

Let’s just imagine that scenario and what it might mean. For local authorities, it would allow data submitted to support planning applications – transport models, ground conditions, contaminated land assessments, site investigations and ecological surveys to be presented in a map layer – making it accessible to decision makers. This could be embedded into a digital twin or a digital gazetteer and allow local authority officers and members to interrogate that the data layer to help inform decision making. I think we could all imagine how that might be useful. There is also something else here about the accumulation and collation of spatial data. We all understand the idea of crowd-sourcing information and the power of citizen science using mass observation to build robust data sets. But where data is stored in a PDF, there’s no opportunity to harness that robustness.  

 If you have never come across it before then please let me introduce you to GiGL. One of my favourite acronyms in the built environment sector – Greenspace information for Greater London – is a records centre that manages, collates and does useful things with environmental data. GiGL offers an array of tools, including data visualisations such as maps, tables and infographics. These tools can help professionals assess a specific site as well as consider wider issues across a neighbourhood or a whole London borough. For example, GiGL has developed a nature deficiency measure – mapping areas in London which have the least greenspace. This tool joins the dots between environmental data and policy goals on accessible natural greenspace and maps them in a way that makes it usable to practitioners. That can of course include decisions on planning applications, or the preparation of a new development plan – but it can also influence other public sector strategies on parks, active travel, school grounds, street trees and budgets for local nature projects.  

In Scotland we are blessed with Canmore which has been refreshed as Trove (an excellent name for all that treasured data). Trove also demonstrates the power of collating information, digitising records and making things accessible and searchable through a web interface. But, imagine going further than GiGL and Canmore and combining heritage data, transport information and all the other things you can think of into the same digital platform. Imagine being able to draw on the information collected through the planning process. What else could you do? What other links could be made? What other synergies could be discovered?  

Glasgow City Council has been doing its own digital data integration work, creating a digital twin which has just been made public (June 2025). It’s a work in progress, but good to see the variety of data layers which have been included in the model – including data about trees and forest cover. In the era of big data, AI tools and the commercialisation of data, joining up data to inform decision makers seems an obvious step. We shouldn’t get hung up on the technicalities of the best way to do this – but rather press ahead with trying it out. And, since architecture and building design is already happening in digital form, digital twins can also support the integration of CAD models of new buildings into the city’s datascape.  

Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently announced a new AI tool called ‘Extract’ being rolled out to planners in England. The tool will enable data to be extracted from planning documents and turn it into data ‘in minutes’. Whilst the emphasis of the Labour Government is on speeding up planning, I think AI tools like this one just might do something much more profound. They could bring data and evidence into decision-making in a way that is simply not possible at the moment. What a breakthrough that would be.   

Dr. Caroline Brown MRTPI is Director for Scotland, Ireland and English Regions at the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI). Caroline is a chartered town planner and experienced planning academic whose research and teaching interests focus on green and blue health, cycling and walking, sustainability and urban form. Over the years she has been involved in several international research collaborations and is currently part of the child-focussed cities network with researchers in Brazil, Australia, Africa and Europe. For the last six years Caroline was Senior Editor at the journal Cities & Health, helping to develop a place for the dissemination of cross-disciplinary research spanning academic, policy and practitioner boundaries in urban planning, public health and policy.  

This blog is part of BEFS ‘Joining the Dots’ series exploring interconnected policy areas. See the first blog for an introduction to the series. 

Get in touch – to find out more about BEFS work or to discuss a particular topic or policy area email us at info@befs.org.uk or contact the Team.