COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT COMMUNITY CONSULTATION
‘The applicant of a proposed Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP), …
..must where relevant make diligent inquiries, carrying out their own investigations and taking their own legal advice, as appropriate. It is the responsibility of the applicant to ensure that their pre-application consultation fully accords with the requirements of the 2008 Act, ……’ (Advice Note Three version 5, The Planning Inspectorate. July 2013)
INCREASING REQUIREMENT Consultation is now becoming an ever increasing requirement for both national and local planning applications. This includes both statutory and non statutory consultees as well as the host communities for a given project.
Decision makers put clear emphasis on consultation both through planning policy requirements but also through the inclusion of a consultation report as part of the suite of planning application documents. This document provides a timeline of your consultation but also how views of stakeholders and communities have been incorporated into proposals.
VITAL CONTRIBUTION
Community consultation has often taken a back seat when developers are progressing a planning application. However Royal HaskoningDHV believe that community consultation can make a vital contribution to the development of a successful planning application by considering the interests of affected parties, encouraging debate and explaining the benefits and appropriateness of the development.
PROMOTING TRANSPARENCY Good consultation promotes transparency about project decision making. This provides a platform for accountability and helps establish trust between the developer and local communities. For consultation to achieve these desirable outcomes, it should be started at the beginning of the project lifecycle.
At each stage of consultation it is important communities need to understand their role and how their views are incorporated. Failure to consult, or doing it effectively, can harm relations between the developer and local community, this could impact achieving consent for the development.
KEY FEATURES OF EFFECTIVE CONSULTATION
There is no official guidance of what is best practice for community consultation, but Royal HaskoningDHV has a proven track record in effective consultation…
• Programme consultation – consult early, consult when you have something to say. Work with the project team to ensure information will be available for each consultation stage
• Ownership – the community should feel that they have ownership of any Community Consultation activity including a sense of participation where possible
• Flexibility – allow yourself to approachable & work with communities
• Transparency – consultation processes should be open and transparent, with clear objectives that are reported
• Resources – consultation processes should be adequately resourced, both by project personnel but also written material suitable for the audience
CONSULTATION FATIGUE A TICK BOX EXERCISE?
Consultation fatigue can occur, especially for a NSIP where the development programme can be protracted, with several required consultation stages built in. This further underpins the need to plan each consultation event providing adequate information to help stakeholders understand the key issues, and setting appropriate response times can all help to reduce fatigue.
It must be noted that often consultation over a lengthy period of time can be frustrating for local communities. It is therefore important expectations are managed to ensure all consultation events achieves its objective by clearly explaining its purpose prior to the event commencing.
COMMUNITY BENEFIT
A clear benefit of community consultation for NSIP is the requirement of developers to produce statements of common ground with affected interested parties. If engagement has occurred throughout the pre-application stage this can allow for these to be easily produced and also for quick agreement between the developer and the consultee.
This can save time during the lead up to planning submission and for NSIP during the examination phase, when resources are stretched and time is short.
INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION It is important to remember, consulting with the community does not necessarily mean that views have to be accepted or incorporated into a proposal. The purpose of consultation is to help inform communities about proposals and to obtain feedback. In a lot of cases it can save time and money by obtaining information first hand and in a more direct manner.
David Morgan Royal HaskoningDHV
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