Planning Permission in Principle (PPiP)

Planning Permission in Principle (PPiP) is a Scottish planning consent route confirming whether a land use and scale of development are acceptable. It does so before detailed design is submitted. It is a first approval step, not a construction licence: developers must still obtain approval of matters specified in conditions before building. For data centers it lets a developer test local authority support for a large campus early, as CX Tech did in October 2026 for a proposed 1 GW, eight-building campus at Chapelcross. Large schemes are usually accompanied by an environmental impact assessment, and a PPiP says nothing about power delivery, tenants or timeline, so projects at this stage should be read as proposals rather than capacity.