Huge thanks to the people of Bathgate who have helped consider the town’s future. This is part of an exercise carried out by West Lothian Council every ten years to engage local citizens throughout the county to assist them in drawing up a “local place plan”. This plan is used by the Council as a guide into the future.
To help gather local views, we delivered leaflets to almost every Bathgate home linking people to an anonymous place based survey, we created social media posts and held face to face discussions, and we got feedback from around 1000 people.
We were very grateful to hear what the local community would like to see in future. It is clear that we all want the Bathgate of 2034 to be a more prosperous and greener place to live, work and enjoy. Thank you for your help.
So what’s next?
We have taken the key themes you told us about and have used these to create a Local Place Plan draft document. This summarises what we collectively think of Bathgate as it is now, and what improvement action we would like to see over the next 10 years.
It is now time to move to consultation on this summary document.
We have sent a copy of the draft to Bathgate and neighbouring councils and community councils, and have allowed 28 days for feedback and revision of the draft.
Most importantly we need to check back in with the local Bathgate community to make sure we have captured what matters most. Given the huge amount of feedback, we haven’t been able to capture every detail everyone said, but hope we have included the most important things that were raised again and again.
Once this completes, we will formally submit the final version to West Lothian Council at the end of March.
Can you help us review what we have done?
Given the suggested format and content of the Local Place Plan, the end result is quite a meaty document – around 80 pages!.
However it is structured in a way that hopefully lets you either read it all, or find key areas of interest to dip into.
It is available below, to either read online, or to download.
Tell us what you think?
We have shared links to this draft document using social media so we reach as wide a group again as we can. We also held another face to face consultation event on the evening of 7th March.
However given the size of the document and it’s importance we don’t want to lose comments that will be harder to find on social media – so ask that you tell us what you think using an email to: