9 — Statements of community consultation

The context

The UK goes through a period of several housing shortage while at the same time planning departments, tasked with overseeing construction, have seen their budget cuts most of all statutory services provided by local authorities. Often time, larger construction schemes in congested areas are particularly controversial from the point of view of existing residents. Yet, often the benefits of the scheme and the opportunities for collaboration with the developer on design tweaks may not be facilitated to the fullest extent.

Your challenge

In the year ending March 2017, Newcastle City Council received 51 large residential planning applications, of which 92% were permitted. Each of these applications require applicants to demonstrate that they have engaged with the ‘community’, including local residents and interest groups. As often the case in densely populated areas (for example the Ouseburn), some applications have seen substantial ‘resistance’ on behalf of local residents. For example, a petition on a development proposal in the Ouseburn Valley area received 1000 objections from local residents. While the city council notes the petition, it also found that information underlying the petition was faulty. Thus, this would invalidate the objections. While the petition raised useful information from objections, it excluded the city council and the developer as two important constituents in this situation.

Now a new development scheme is coming up for which the council will mandate the developer to run a pre-application consultation in early 2018. The housing officer stated:

‘ …It is a controversial site and has been the subject of considerable public consultation over the years.  However, it is questionable whether respondents represent a representative cross-section of the community.  The intention is for the selected developer to carry out pre-application consultation early in the new year ahead of consideration of a planning application in the Spring.’

Your project aligns to the time scales the council is working by and will help officers understand best practice for such pre-application consultations.

Your deliverables

Your task will be to draft out a model ‘community involvement app’. Your concept should help run these pre-application consultations more effectively. In this project, you will thus be asked to look what a ‘standardised’ approach to early community involvement may look like. Essentially you would need to analyse some ‘statements of community involvement’ from past construction projects to notice any (1) best practice, (2) commonalities, (3) and the respective success of the underlying application. Based on this, you could then explore what components a tool for a standardised engagement mechanism might look like.

The exact design of the deliverables will be up to you. However, the project will broadly result in the following:

  • An easy-to-understand, implementable concept, explained via a ‘story board’ for a standardised pre-application community engagement method;
  • A brief review of statements of community involvement supplied by the client to identify best practice
  • An interactive prototype of your design concept
  • As part of this, an outline of user or device interfaces.