If it's a step-change in the level of involvement, they .... a cold winter day and two books were filled with ... (recognising constraints/givens): There is a fine.
cost-effective community involvement in planning
part 2: the lessons so far Local planning authorities and developers desperately need advice on cost-effective community involvement, says Barry Pearce, who, in the second part of a two-part article, examines the lessons that can be drawn from experience to date Part 1 of this article1 considered the comparative lack of attention that has been paid to the cost and resource side of community involvement. But despite the shortage of advice on cost-effective community involvement, there is nevertheless some significant experience to draw upon. So what does it tell us? The experience so far of local authorities and developers who are doing well with their community involvement, and of bodies like Planning Aid, suggests that local authorities (and developers) who achieve value for money, within limited budgets, do the following: ● They don’t fudge the issue of resources and costs – they decide what they want to achieve but then prioritise; they think about what everything costs (including the costs of not doing good-quality community involvement) and then decide what they can afford and set a realistic budget. ● They are well organised – with their resources and priorities in mind, they plan and manage the process and delivery of community involvement as a project. ● They find methods and approaches that really work and yet don’t cost the earth, and they find ways of reducing their costs (without doing too much harm to quality). ● On the other hand, they also recognise where it is not sensible to cut corners. They also realise the dangers of spending too little, of paring back too much, of setting a budget that
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is too low. Certainly, they don’t automatically assume that community involvement is an extra, and that therefore by not having it savings will be made. So they expend money and effort to save time and money in the long run – they invest in the future. And to do this, they find innovative ways of levering out more resources for community involvement.
A realistic budget to match priorities The point about not fudging the issue of resources and costs is fundamental. For a start, cost-effective community involvement has to take into account the varying and differing nature of the benefits obtainable. There is not just one set of benefits of community involvement; it is possible to obtain many different benefits (and combinations of benefits) – and each benefit (and each combination) has its corresponding costs. Not all authorities will want the same package of benefits. For some, reducing the level of conflict will be important, for others it will be extending the range of people that get involved. More radically, some authorities and developers may decide that they want to focus their efforts on trying to engage the silent majority, the seldom-heard or the hard-to-reach (and it is arguable that local authorities tend to spend far too much on finding out the views of those Town & Country Planning November 2007
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people who are going to tell them what they think anyway – who are going to get involved almost come what may). Choices need to be made, and cost-effective community involvement will depend on the range of benefits that are being sought and the ends the local authority or developer are trying to achieve (see Panel 2 in Part 1 of this article1). They may feel, for example, that if they focus on the seldom-heard they might be spending their limited resources more wisely (although of course if inclusivity is not important, they may wonder why they should bother much with those who choose not to get involved without expensive techniques having to be deployed). Whatever their view, by thinking about their priorities and making choices – by eliminating things they don’t really want to achieve and focusing on what is really important – it is possible that they can make their resources go a lot further; and the best authorities do just that. In effect, ‘you pays your money and you takes your choice’. Some local authorities or developers save money by being less ambitious – and it is worth noting that the regulations on and requirements for community involvement actually allow a degree of discretion to local authorities to do what they want, perhaps more than is often thought,2 as long as they can justify it given their budget. Of course, authorities need to be aware that this is what they are doing (and the risks involved). Importantly, the best local authorities and developers have found that there are different forms of cost-effective community involvement, depending on what they want to achieve. If it’s getting information or ideas, they use one set of methods. If it’s a step-change in the level of involvement, they use another set. And if it’s fewer objections, they use yet another set, and so on. Some options are better than others. And of course, the more the authority or developer wants to achieve, the more cost-effective community involvement will cost. Once priorities have been established, a budget has to be set, and this needs to be realistic – matching those community involvement priorities with what can be afforded (and thus with other priorities). Setting a proper budget depends on a whole variety of things: for example, the aims and priorities, the size of the target community, the complexity of the issues being consulted on, and what the authority can afford (in relation to other priorities). As authorities develop their experience of cost-effective community involvement, it is also an iterative process: starting with thinking about aims, objectives and priorities, then costing possible means of achieving them, then seeing if it can be done at lower cost (or, rather, if the budget has to be increased), and so on. But if the authority doesn’t think about setting a budget and putting in place proper controls, expenditure can very quickly get out 402
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of hand (as it would for any block of expenditure). This is not a new idea; just good practice. The most cost-effective authorities and developers have found that there are limits to how far their ambitions for community involvement can be pared back. Many of the aims are inter-related. For authorities that genuinely want to produce a step-change in the level of engagement, community involvement has not been cheap. For a step-change to occur, people have to be convinced that the whole process is genuine and worth while. They have to know, right from the start, that their involvement will make a difference. It’s a matter of respect. This means that there has to be genuine power-sharing; if there isn’t, then the next time the authority wants to involve the community, they will stay away in droves. And if power-sharing is going to happen, there has to be a significant investment in capacity-building, so that the community are equipped to deal with the complexities of the planning system and the issues being dealt with. And of course, all this costs money, and time. In addition, the really thoughtful authorities recognise that not spending sufficient on community involvement has its own costs, and will be costly; and indeed that spending resources on community involvement at the right time can produce significant savings in the long run. For example, there is a growing understanding that getting community involvement right (most especially front-loaded involvement) will mean fewer objections later on in the process (at the official ‘representations’ stages, for both development plan documents and planning applications) and will thus lower the costs of having to defend and counter these objections.3 A number of local authorities and developers have found the savings here can be very substantial indeed. Furthermore, spending up-front on community involvement (again of the right kind) will reduce the need to spend so much on separate evidence collection and separate brainstorming exercises – or separate consultancy advice – whether to identify issues or generate ideas and options. Community involvement is, in these cases, less a required ‘extra’ and more an alternative to other activities normally carried out and requiring expenditure. It is pretty apparent, even from a cursory review of current statements of community involvement (SCIs), that many (if not most) local authorities have been avoiding the issue of cost-effective community involvement, especially by fudging the issue of how it is to be resourced. This has been a problem exacerbated by the Planning Inspectorate, which has said openly that when examining SCIs it cannot address the issue of the level and adequacy of resource availability (largely because the Inspectorate doesn’t feel equipped to deal with it4); it can only examine whether local authorities appear
to have thought about it. It is a strategy which unfortunately has allowed some authorities not to think about the resource question much at all – a big mistake. To keep costs down and get value for money, it is vital that local authorities (and developers) have a budget for community involvement – and proper management systems in place to control expenditure and so keep focused on the target and/or purposes. Good organisation The second key lesson about cost-effective community involvement is that it requires good organisation. Many local authorities don’t really think enough about how their programme of community involvement is to be planned and managed. Somewhat curiously, while authorities have been encouraged by the Government to have proper project and programme management in delivering their local development schemes and local development frameworks,5 this has not happened when it comes to community involvement.6 And yet planning ahead and better project or programme management can save a lot of time, money and
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organisation (not just within the planning department, for example). In particular, they ensure that there is minimal repetition of consultation activities and, indeed, no more consultation than is necessary to achieve their aims (this helps to cut costs and has the added benefit of reducing consultation fatigue). In effect, they already have a comprehensive ‘community engagement strategy’ of the kind recommended in the Planning and Local Government White Papers. They also spend a good deal of time on process design, for example on: ● identifying the key stakeholders, components and steps involved in community involvement (breaking them down into coherent groups and manageable chunks); ● preparatory meetings with community groups and networks, assembling FAQs, considering what publicity, information, activities and events, and reporting is needed (and their sequencing), identifying the key constraints on the choices available (although not inventing parameters where they don’t exist), and managing expectations;
Left Many traditional and conventional approaches to community involvement have proved to be expensive yet largely ineffective, but there are other methods that have helped in developing constructive collaboration between the community and councils or developers
other resources; and the best local authorities are managing to do this. A few points are worth making here. The best authorities (and developers) take the following approach: ● They think carefully about who manages their community involvement plan – ensuring clear lines of authority and responsibility. They appoint a programme manager within the authority to move things along, in accordance with their aims, objectives and budget. ● They have a steering group or committee to advise on the whole process, and on this committee they make a point of having members of the local community (as discussed later). ● They ensure that there is co-ordination of the consultation activities carried out across their
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identifying the required evidence base (which involving the community is supposed to contribute towards) and setting up arrangements for recording activities and progress; identifying the community involvement methods most appropriate to the target communities, the level of planning being addressed and the stage in the process that has been reached; setting and committing to a clear timetable, including a sequential programme of activities, and trying hard to keep to it – the timetable cannot be so tight that it allows insufficient time for the community to get involved, but equally it cannot be so drawn out that people forget where they are; Town & Country Planning November 2007
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identifying staff and other resources allocated to community involvement tasks, and any constraints on their availability; identifying key events that will have a significant effect on what can be achieved (for example local elections, holiday periods, weather-related constraints); and establishing how all this fits into the authority’s own cabinet or committee cycle, and the timescales and cycle for other relevant policy and strategy documents (such as the regional spatial strategy, the community strategy and other related local development documents).
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Relatively inexpensive methods and approaches, and reducing costs The third key lesson about cost-effective community involvement is that there are some real opportunities to cut some of the costs that councils have put up with in the past. The best councils and developers use consultation and involvement methods that really work and at the same time are relatively inexpensive. They employ approaches and techniques that achieve their aims, that are appropriate to spatial planning and to the stage reached in community involvement, that reach and engage their target groups, and that secure the information they need; but which are also value for money and will not break the bank. For example, for informing the community on what is going on, they mobilise and encourage instructive
‘features’ in local newspapers, community and free newspapers, and on local and community radio. Rather than spending a lot on formal advertising, they deploy low-cost posters, arrange guided walking tours, and put information on their websites.7 And for consulting and involving the community, they use low-cost interactive displays and reach out to the community at family-based events that are already set up for people seeking interesting and enjoyable things to do (see Panel 1). They work with readily assembled and representative groups that already exist (such as parish councils, neighbourhood planning groups and community forums8) via relatively economical facilitated workshops and focus groups. In addition, they use low-cost surveys and sampling – making sure they are well structured, representative and ask questions that will give the authority or developer the information they need (i.e. useful evidence). (There is generally a lack of understanding of statistics and sampling – and especially that the size of the sample required does not depend much on the size of the population. Snowballing techniques – see below – can be acceptable when the population is not known and it’s difficult to see how to get a representative sample.) While not exactly cheap and cheerful, such approaches are relatively inexpensive and can be very cost effective. On the other hand, the best authorities don’t use a lot of the traditional and conventional approaches to community involvement which have proved to be
Panel 1: Low-cost ideas for successful community involvement nickwates.co.uk / communityplanning.net ●
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Use simple low-cost interactive approaches like ‘Street Stall’ (pictured on the right): shoppers in Bath joined in a debate on the future of the town centre by writing on Post-it notes, sketching their own ideas and holding discussions with the organisers. Over 2,000 Post-it notes were posted up over five hours on a cold winter day and two books were filled with comments. Piggyback outreach consultation activities on existing community activities, especially those involving all the family. Reach people where they are (rather than expecting them to come to you): ● Set up a consultation stall/exhibition at summer fetes and village/parish fairs, youth events/projects, playgroups, mother and toddler groups, and car boot sales (where the local community are coming out and looking for fun). ● Go to workplaces, leisure centres, clubs, school, doctors’ surgeries, drop-in advice centres (for example housing benefit/refugee surgeries), and the ‘natural’ meeting places that people go to chat informally (sports groups, places where parents meet children after school, the local pub). ● Attend pensioner events, community outings, schools, churches, temples and mosques. ● Use familiar, busy, easily accessible venues – places where people naturally pass by, such as local markets, tower block foyers (although organise activities for when and where people have time to stop and are open to contact, not when they are speeding through).
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expensive yet largely ineffective. There is often a huge amount of resistance here (for example from elected representatives and officers brought up on, and enjoying, a traditional menu of consultation activities), but the most efficient councils have learned to avoid expensive methods of community involvement that are also poor value. They don’t rely, for example, on: ● Unhelpful/adversarial public meetings: These simply attract objectors, fuel unhelpful conflict and, all round, are generally destructive rather than constructive. ● Glossy and expensive written plans and reports: The best authorities don’t see the very documents they must produce within the statutory process (the various studies and draft plans) as important parts of the community involvement process. Spending money on glossy and expensive versions of these is particularly wasteful – expensive, ineffective, even counterproductive.9 ● General, open-ended opinion polls, surveys and referenda: These rarely provide robust evidence. Surveys need to be properly designed and targeted, providing for clear options and choices, although also as clear and simple as possible. ● Websites that can be captured or manipulated by unrepresentative groups: The Government has found the drawbacks recently, through the facility for petitions on the Downing Street website. ● Media advertising: This is almost invariably expensive and too often seen by the community as an exercise in manipulative public relations. ● Fixed exhibitions: These just don’t get around to enough people. ● Elaborate, holistic methods with fancy names that are copyrighted and appropriated (especially by commercial organisations): Such methods often claim to cover everything! A fairly obvious, but surprisingly overlooked way of keeping costs down is to share those costs with other departments and other agencies where possible. A simple example: how many local authorities write their own information leaflets on development plans, the planning application process, tree preservation orders, etc.? How much cheaper would it be if they shared this with neighbouring authorities? More radically (and an option used or being considered by a number of councils), what about sharing the cost of a community planning liaison officer or community planner? (This kind of possibility is considered in the ‘Finding further resources’ section below.) Some things, of course, don’t cost much – if anything – at all; they are simply good practice, and can lead to savings. Simple things like: ● Not duplicating a consultation that has already asked the same questions or provided the
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evidence required: This has the added benefit that it reduces the problem of consultation fatigue. It is amazing just how much duplication there often is. In one authority there were over 100 consultations across just a six-month period, nearly all targeting the same groups; and this is by no means atypical. Managing expectations and encouraging realism (recognising constraints / givens): There is a fine balance to be achieved between encouraging blue sky thinking and hence creativity on the one hand, and raising false expectations on the other. But if people are not made aware of real world constraints the result will likely be cynicism and negativity. Blank-sheet ‘comment-forms’ that simply invite views on a development proposal (for example to gauge the level of support for and feeling about it) are usually a wasted opportunity. Including elected representatives: There are dangers in bypassing the democratic process; in particular elected representatives can very quickly become alienated, negative and unhelpful. Participative and representative democracy need to be seen as complements, not alternatives. Being genuinely respectful to the community: People need to be greeted and treated as equals. Venues for consultation activities should be accessible for the target audience. Consultation has to really listen to what people have to say; it should not be reactive and defensive. It is important to maintain relations with the community even when it is proving difficult. For the involvement of some communities, especially black and minority ethnic groups, treating people – and especially the community’s elders – with great respect is at a particular premium. Equally, there have to be responsibilities on the community side. It is important to knock on the head knee-jerk, racist and anti-social comments and reactions. Not labelling a consultation activity a ‘planning event’: This is usually a big mistake – a big turn-off to the communities that planners are trying to attract. Effective authorities call it something like ‘Your neighbourhood, its future’, and don’t confine it to ‘planning’ (i.e. ‘development’) issues. It is important to convey the issues (what the community want for the neighbourhood and what problems they see) in as clear a way as possible, and get people thinking about actions; yet on the whole the community are confused by jargon and don’t see the difference between planning and other government activities that shape the places in which they live and the services they use (and why should they?). The authority (or developer) needs to feed ‘irrelevant’ comments back to the other departments and agencies to whom they are relevant; the community expect things to be joined up (and quite rightly so). Town & Country Planning November 2007
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Don’t cut corners The fourth key lesson about cost-effective community involvement is something of an antidote to thinking too much about reducing costs. Shortterm cheap can prove long-term expensive. While being very alive to the possibility of reducing costs, the best authorities don’t cut the important corners. They avoid methods that don’t work well even though they may be cheap. In addition, they don’t automatically assume that community involvement is an extra, and that therefore by not having it savings will be made. Some of the most common lessons in this respect are (depending on the authority’s or the developer’s aims for community involvement): ● Start early and don’t leave it too late. The maxim of consulting early is, pretty universally, good advice. If the community feel they are first being consulted too late in the day, when key decisions have already been made, they will quickly become disaffected, even angry. Destructive resistance rather than constructive comment will follow; delays will result; and in future consultations the public will not believe the process is genuine – and so either will not turn out or will become even more negative.10 ● Don’t cut corners on information provision – for example on surveys giving vital facts and figures on local issues, development trends, constraints and possibilities. ● Don’t cut corners on publicity (to ensure people know of the important information, what is being proposed, forthcoming consultation events and how they can get involved, and what progress is being made). Publicity has to be effective if the community are to be aware of the consultation. Community involvement has to be adequately marketed, and it is essential to use accessible and relevant language (for example plain English, and foreign languages where needed). ● Involve a cross-section of the community and don’t allow the consultation to be dominated by a few parochial or myopic single-issue interest groups or use methods that bias or skew responses (for example towards objectors). Otherwise how can community involvement be seen to be – and, more importantly, actually be – anywhere near representative? ● Build the capacity, internal to the organisation, to organise and deliver community involvement – for example train staff in facilitation skills and event management, and, if affordable, invest in proper consultation databases, and employ staff with consultation expertise. ● Make the consultation process attractive and worth while to the community itself. The community have to enjoy community involvement activities – the best authorities and developers actually make it fun and attractive; and this 406
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requires an investment of time and effort. The community also need to believe they have made a difference if they are to take part and continue to take part. It is really important to feed back ‘good news stories’ of successes that show the community’s involvement has achieved results. Cutting back here is simply wasteful. Think how community involvement can work with, complement or even substitute for mainstream planning work – for example the provision of survey evidence and ideas (on both issues and options), and work to deal with objections. Community involvement need not necessarily be seen just as an ‘extra’, producing benefits that other planning work cannot generate. On the contrary, it can complement, even replace, other mainstream planning activity. Cutting back on community involvement may as a result not have the savings initially thought of; by not cutting back on community involvement it might be possible to cut back on other mainstream work. At the very least, community involvement might produce savings elsewhere. Attempt to develop consensus. Community involvement represents not only an opportunity to obtain information on what the community thinks and feels, but also a chance to build local communities. The emphasis needs to be on trying to develop win-win outcomes, and this requires extensive use of workshop-type arrangements. Keep proper and accurate records of the process, and especially of the views and information collected from it. Give feedback. It is especially important to provide feedback on the results at the end of the process. This, again, improves the community’s willingness and confidence to get involved the next time. Failure to give feedback leads to cynicism and a feeling that the community are simply being used, especially aggravating those who feel they are the losers. Learn from the process. Community involvement is still in the early days of its development, and to a certain extent its success will depend on local circumstances. The community, councils and developers all need to invest some effort in learning from the consultation process in order to improve it for the future, and so need to put in place monitoring and review procedures. Reviewing (and learning) will usually itself produce savings in long run – it should not be cut out. It is important to evaluate, learn and so do better next time.
Investment in the long term – spending money to save money! A complementary and matching approach to not cutting corners is realising that good community involvement, even when expensive, can and will save money and even generate ‘returns’ in the long
run. Evidently, many local authorities are not so convinced. However, some things are resource intensive in the short term but work out cheaper and more effective in the long run. The value of having good planning and organisation has already been mentioned. Successful local authorities and developers find it is important to do their homework – especially to know their community and, for instance, who the non-participators are, why they don’t participate, and hence what is likely to encourage them to get involved. And from the catalogue of lessons noted above (in the ‘Don’t cut corners’ section), it is clear that good advice in this respect is likely to include front-loading, spending on effective publicity, out-reach events to attract the hard-to-reach, workshops to build consensus, questionnaire surveys and information gathering from the community, building up the organisation’s internal capacity to manage and carry out community involvement, and procedures to monitor and review community involvement activity. Cost-effective authorities and developers know what approaches and methods are expensive but can still be good value, and use them carefully: ● Building up a team of consultation specialists, organisation-wide. ● Developing a strong marketing ‘brand’ for the whole programme of consultation events. This really helps publicise community involvement activities. ● Use of clear publicity and information materials, leaflets etc. (including summaries of key documents) in languages that are accessible and relevant (to the target community).
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Use of roadshows and mobile exhibitions to get the consultation message (and activity) round to the widest range of people. Use of surveys, for finding the views of the silent majority, using oral, face-to-face, one-to-one interviews where possible. These are especially effective where local people – peers – are trained and used as interviewers (although this needs quality control). And because often it is not possible to identify a truly random sample, snowballing – asking contacts for referrals for interviewing – can be very effective (see above). Use of facilitated workshops/conferences (for example Planning for Real® and Enquiry by Design type events, combining inputs from both experts and community representatives). These have proved highly effective at developing constructive collaboration between the community and councils/developers. However, there is evidence that people are becoming increasingly suspicious of facilitation, and only truly independent facilitation will be cost effective. Use of incentives to encourage people to attend events (such as childcare facilities, refreshments) and complete surveys (for example prizes). Developing basic training and capacity-building for the community (for example on the planning system for community stakeholders).
Although encouraged and available in relatively few urban areas, a particularly cost-effective approach in the long run is support for and use of neighbourhood planning groups and community forums (see Panel 2). These can be very effective, helping to embed
Panel 2: The neighbourhood planning group ● ● ● ● ● ●
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An informal meeting of local residents and community representatives. Formed to discuss emerging development proposals and plans and forward comments and ideas on to the authorities. Supported by community enablers (for example Planning Aid). It meets ‘regularly’, in a local accessible venue, with its meetings (including agendas) advertised. It is voluntary, open to anyone with an interest; they can come and go as they please. It works at its openness, so as not to be a clique. Discussion is encouraged, acceptable compromise is sought, and a consensus-building approach is adopted – for example with use of ground rules (such as everyone agrees not to dominate) and meetings being chaired, so that a vocal minority doesn’t dominate. Can be part of a community partnership or neighbourhood forum. Helps to organise and publicise bigger consultation events. Eventually, it may develop its own ‘community plan’ (note: the parish plan/village design statement model; possible supplementary planning document). Examples from Bristol: Easton Neighbourhood Planning Group, Brislington Community Partnership, Redcliffe Futures, St Pauls Unlimited, Lockleaze Voice.
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constructive community involvement in planning in ways that are not otherwise possible. They help develop local interest and understanding of planning issues and then provide a constructive conduit for local people to engage with and influence planning. And because they’re open, they’re potentially representative of all those who want to be involved. And in return, they provide a conduit for the authorities to meet and exchange views with the community. They can form part of a local community partnership organisation and so need not replicate other groups, for example local amenity societies. Moreover, they are not as expensive as many authorities believe. They are not appropriate for everywhere (some areas have low levels of development pressure for example, and so there may be less demand and need for a structure of this kind). And although they may require some set-up investment at the early stages, as long as they are well organised they soon become self-supporting, requiring only a selective injection of support at particular times. Finding further resources The fifth and final major lesson for cost-effective community involvement in planning is that too many planning departments and developers try to organise and do it alone, when there is a good deal of help and support available. There is always more to be done than budgets allow, so the really effective authorities and developers seek out innovative, initially non-obvious, ways of finding new resources for community involvement. The best authorities have been surprised by just how much assistance is out there for them – and conversely some councils and developers have not secured the best community involvement they could because they have not thought about how they can tap into and get the additional resources that exist. There are, for example, enormous savings and benefits to be had from a joint or partnership approach with others, joining with or even piggybacking on others’ consultations where possible.11 The best authorities and developers take a strategic approach, looking for potential partners (both inside and outside the organisation). This enables them to benefit from a wider pool of resources, share costs, avoid duplication, and make the widest possible use of consultation results. Planning departments can secure a lot of help from other departments in the council and other public bodies. Joint working with IT and community relations departments, for example, can be invaluable for publicising community involvement (organising websites and broadcasting events in council community newspapers, for example). Other departments may also be a good source of contact for particular target audiences (for example gypsy and traveller liaison officers and community 408
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development workers working in disadvantaged communities). Planners need to work with these other departments from as early as possible, for a council-wide approach is best. Moreover, other parts of the authority are also carrying out their own consultations. A number of councils have been joining up community involvement in both their core and community strategies (for example Tunbridge Wells, and Taunton Deane). Many councils have found that there are economies of scale and sharing by appointing a corporate or authority-wide consultation officer (or team) who can specialise in and handle all the authority’s community involvement, and/or a community liaison officer who co-ordinates contact between the planning department and external community bodies (for example parish councils and neighbourhood planning groups). And councils are not the only ones within the public sector who need to consult with and involve the community. As well as the housing and economic development departments within the council, the local strategic partnership, the police authority, the primary care trust, parish councils, town councils and community partnerships all organise community involvement, as (more informally) do local councillors. Often they are all asking the same – or at least very similar – questions as planning departments, and are seeking the same outcomes.
‘Community involvement cannot be done on the (very) cheap. Over-tight budgets may lead to cutting corners and poor results in the long term. Inadequate community involvement can itself be costly. But there is much that can be achieved that is relatively inexpensive’ There are other unexploited resources to be found. The possibility of using the ability, under the Local Government Act 2003, to charge developers for ‘discretionary activities’ to recover the cost of providing community involvement, and maybe even of using section 106 to pool developer contributions for ‘continuing CI’,12 is largely untapped. But councils are now getting used to developer-led preapplication consultations, although there is a growing recognition of the need, where this happens, for protocols and ground rules to ensure that good practice is adhered to and community involvement is not mere public relations.
There are other possibilities too, for example teaming up with Planning Aid (which can often give process advice, staff training, help with meetings etc. in relation to planning applications and also SCI and development plan documents, especially where disadvantaged and hard-to-reach communities are concerned); free facilitation networks and local community mediation services (for example InterAct Networks); and various community enablers (for example the rural community councils). A particularly fertile – and ‘free’ (at least in strict accounting terms, but see below) – resource for community involvement is contained within the community itself. The best authorities and developers involve local people in devising, organising and carrying out community involvement, bringing them in at an early stage. For example, they include members of the community on the ‘consultation steering committee’. But they go further. Some authorities and developers are proving expert at mustering and mobilising the community’s moving spirits, the community champions that almost all communities have – the people who do things, whom local people turn to for advice, support and getting things done, and who are vital in getting the rest of the community activated and engaged. And they train local residents to help carry out consultation events and surveys (complementing the skills local people already have). In this, local people often do a better job than outsiders, for less outlay, using their local knowledge to access residents and get them onside, and creating a more constructive mood from the outset. There is now a growing stock of user-friendly methodologies to enable and facilitate this community-led planning, for example ‘Placecheck’ (an urban design ‘toolkit’ devised by the Urban Design Alliance), the ‘Parish Plan Toolkit’ (produced by ACRE), and ‘Place Shaper’ (from CABE).13 The value of these ‘community’ resources should not be under-rated, for they can be really significant. It has been estimated, for example, that the time alone contributed by community representatives and volunteers in the parish plan process is worth on average over £72,000 per plan! This is a truly staggering amount of support, especially when it is totalled up for the country as a whole. And it doesn’t even begin to account for the extra resources the process brings into the community resulting from Lottery and grant trust applications, or the time put in by local volunteers to deliver the community projects that emerge from consultations as being needed, from youth clubs, through litterpicks to local skateboard parks. Of course, a note of caution is needed here. There is a fine balance to be achieved between getting the community to do things and exploiting that community. There are murmurings about
consultation fatigue, and it is a very real danger. The community want to get involved, especially when they are not confident that their representatives (and the public servants) are doing their job properly or are being effective in putting the community’s views across. But equally, on the whole the community do not want to have to get involved unnecessarily; they do not want to take over the role of councillors or officers unless it is really essential to do so. In particular, they will start to feel put upon if they feel their representatives and paid officials are not doing their job properly and are merely passing the buck. There is a limit on the preparedness of the community to be overloaded with responsibilities they feel should be taken on more properly by others. Meeting the challenge There is now a huge amount of experience that has been accumulated on cost-effective community involvement, and this despite the fact that the professional and official advice has focused insufficiently on resources and costs. Community involvement of course requires resources (time, effort, money, appropriate facilities), appropriate skills (communication, networking, empathy, openness, facilitation), political will and support, commitment, determination, imagination and ingenuity, and an approach that is tailored to the particular local circumstances. This can be extremely resource intensive, not to say costly. Moreover, there are always risks: not least of which are consultation fatigue, people not turning out for consultations, more delay, more conflict and less trust (and especially a lot of dissatisfaction among those who lose the argument). Even when the community trust the process, people will usually want the opportunity to choose not to participate as much as to participate – and they will often choose not to. At the very least, their commitment will vary over time. Community involvement cannot be done on the (very) cheap. Over-tight budgets may lead to cutting corners and poor results in the long term. Inadequate community involvement can itself be costly. But there is much that can be achieved that is relatively inexpensive, and at the same time achieves aims and gives value for money. Most importantly this can be achieved by: ● planning community involvement carefully, having a budget and prioritising; ● being organised, and managing and keeping to a timetable; ● reducing unnecessary duplication of consultation, spreading costs by joining with other agencies, and making the widest possible use of consultation results; ● using resources available in council departments other than the planning department; Town & Country Planning November 2007
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using free help, for example the community and Planning Aid; using cost-effective methods, such as neighbourhood planning groups, facilitated workshops, sample targeted surveys, and fun outreach events, piggybacked on others – a balanced mix of methods avoiding costly and yet ineffective methods, for example public meetings and big open-ended surveys; and reviewing lessons for the future.
Certainly cost-effective community involvement is a challenge. But there is sufficient experience to suggest it is a challenge that can be met.
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Barry Pearce is Co-ordinator of South West Planning Aid and is also Visiting Professor in Planning at the University of the West of England (UWE). He is especially grateful for comments from Jeff Bishop of BDOR Ltd on a draft of this article.
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Notes 1 B. Pearce: ‘Cost-effective community involvement in planning. Part 1: A gaping hole in the advice’. Town & Country Planning, 2007, Vol. 76, Oct., 345-9 2 Although, by contrast, it is clear that many councils have also made the mistake of regarding the ‘informal’ Regulation 25 consultation as more discretionary than it was intended by the legislators to be 3 It is often not so much that the absolute level of objection itself has reduced – indeed, community involvement can bring to the surface and make more apparent hidden conflict – but, rather, that people are more content that their voice has been heard and has been taken into account 4 A curious argument, really, given that the Inspectorate has had to take on a range of new and unfamiliar kinds of understanding under the new spatial planning system. Clearly it has been happy to take on some new areas of responsibility but not others, perhaps further out of its comfort zone. But, equally, maybe it should not have been given the responsibility in the first place; and certainly it would be extremely difficult for the Inspectorate to tell an authority what to spend. An alternative, and possibly better, approach would be to have self-certification of SCIs; dependent on the local authority being able to agree it with the local community 5 See, for example, Creating Local Development Frameworks. A Companion Guide to PPS12. Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 2004. Part 6, pp. 57-61 6 Another way of putting this: there has been lots of advice and guidance on the ingredients of community involvement, but little on good recipes. None of the tests of soundness for SCIs challenges local authorities to show that their strategy for community involvement will be properly project managed. As a result it has not been an issue for Planning Inspectors to check on. And this despite guidance provided in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister publication, Making Plans 7 There are risks in these approaches, particularly that the message the authority wishes to get across may get distorted and manipulated. For involving the community, local newspaper features and the web are less reliable for that reason. But carefully managed –
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and particularly for getting across information – these risks can be minimised Not all such groups are representative, and care has to be taken over choosing which groups to work with Of course the law requires the production of a range of documents as part of the planning process, and planning documents are an inevitable and important consequence of that process. The documents that have to be produced, however, are not good as vehicles for community involvement; they should be seen for what they are, and not as something for which they are inappropriate. Other means of communicating ideas and proposals and eliciting comments need to be used Later on in the process, people do understand (when it is explained to them) that, in the real world, commitments start to be made and decision-making becomes more constrained. They also understand that the owners of land and developers face financial demands and constraints. At this stage, adverse reaction from the community is most likely when there is clearly a pretence that everything is up for grabs when it is not or when the developer has manipulated the situation (for example the definition of constraints) to its own advantage A more corporate, authority-wide, approach to community involvement is proposed in the Local Government White Paper, Strong and Prosperous Communities (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2006), in the idea of ‘community engagement strategies’ to replace, among other things, the SCI See B. Pearce: ‘Time for a community involvement surcharge?’. Town & Country Planning, 2006, Vol. 75, Jun., 177-9 South West Planning Aid is developing and producing its own ‘Locality Check’, a tool which local communities can use to assess how environmentally sustainable the developed environment of their neighbourhood is
