Are you listening? Time for the consultation report revolution. 

By Olivia White – Director

Consultation Report, Statement of Community Involvement, Response Document, whatever you call them, they take up a huge amount of time and are probably among the least read planning documents. And surely, they should be the most important. The document that shows what people said about a project and why those comments will or will not be taken forward. A document that keeps a developer accountable and builds trust with the process.

But instead, we get one of two extremes. Either lightweight reports focused on what was done rather than what was said, or massive, unintelligible documents that no reasonable person would ever read cover to cover.

The most extreme example has to be NSIP Consultation Reports; pages upon pages of proof that you’ve met the requirements of the Planning Act 2008, supported by reams of evidence and tables of responses to issues. In my experience, many far exceed 1,000 pages of inaccessible PDFs.

Who are these documents written for? The Planning Inspectorate, prescribed parties – certainly not the public. And that’s the fundamental problem. The people who take time out of their lives to engage with a consultation deserve to see, clearly and simply, that they were heard. Instead, they get a compliance exercise buried in a PDF graveyard.

With the removal of statutory consultation from the NSIP process, my one hope is that this archaic way of reporting is transformed.

So, what replaces it? The Government’s September 2025 consultation on streamlining infrastructure planning proposed that “guidance could suggest that applicants voluntarily publish an engagement summary report alongside their application. Unlike the current consultation reports, this report would not need to explain compliance with statutory requirements, contain all responses and set out the account taken of them, or be part of the acceptance test. It would instead be an opportunity for applicants to set out how the applicant approached engagement, summarise what engagement took place and how this has informed their application. Where no or limited engagement has taken place, applicants could also provide their reasoning for this” .

Simply: here’s what we did, here’s what we heard, here’s how it shaped the project.

Whilst we await further guidance, the industry should be taking this time to consider how it can revolutionise these horrible documents into something meaningful for the communities and stakeholders who take time to be involved in the process.

When it comes to consultations, no one does more than Government. And they have clear guidance on how to report back.

The UK Government Consultation Principles (2018) requires departments to “publish responses within 12 weeks of the consultation” and to “explain the responses that have been received from consultees and how these have informed the policy” . Twelve weeks. Not six months to a year later buried in a planning submission document.

I think the planning industry should adopt the Government’s own standard as its baseline: respond quickly, respond clearly, and show people how their input shaped decisions. Anything less is a failure of accountability.

And here’s where it gets exciting. The technology now exists to fundamentally change how we process and report on consultation feedback.

What do people want?

They want to trust the system and know they’ve been listened to, even if the answer is “we heard you, but here’s why we went a different way.” That means responding quickly, transparently, and at scale. AI makes this possible in ways that were unthinkable even two years ago.

The implication for consultation reports is profound. If we can analyse thousands of responses in minutes rather than months, we can report back to communities in weeks rather than burying their feedback in a submission document half a year later. AI doesn’t just save time, it enables a fundamentally different relationship between developers and communities.

What good looks like

So, what does a public-first consultation report actually look like?

It means clear “You Said, We Did” formats that anyone can understand. It means using AI to process feedback at speed and report back at scale. And it means designing consultation reports for the public first, not the Planning Inspectorate.

Only through this public-first approach will we maintain trust in the project and the process. The regulatory freedom is coming. The technology is here. The best practice exists. Now it’s on us the industry to deliver the consultation report revolution.