How the Planning and Infrastructure Bill will reshape community engagement. 

By Anna Collins – Senior Account Director

The UK’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill is on the cusp of becoming law – having cleared the House of Lords this week and awaiting final Commons approval, we can expect Royal Assent before Christmas.  

Against this backdrop, Cavendish’s Infrastructure & Energy team hosted an expert panel on navigating consultation in a reformed planning landscape this Tuesday.  

Bringing together industry leading experts Toby Gibbs (Logika Consultants), James Parker (BCLP), Carly Vince (Quod) and Sarah Wardle (Cavendish) we delved into what this brave new world of pre-application consultation and engagement might look like.  

Here are some of the panel’s key insights on the implications….  

1. Opportunities for more meaningful consultation: The current regime has been critiqued as too rigid in its statutory requirements meaning developers have tended to produce reams of highly complex environmental information not tailored to different needs of communities, land interests or prescribed parties. The proposed changes mean developers can focus on delivering meaningful materials that are more accessible for communities, without fear of non-compliance. Resources that might have gone into statutory requirements such as printing off preliminary environmental information reports, can be redirected towards engagement tools that help communities better understand the process, impacts of the project or what they can/cannot influence in a more innovative and accessible way.  

2. Accountability and incorporating feedback: A vital stage of meaningful consultation is showing how feedback has been listened to and incorporated into design. With the removal of the need to include a bulky consultation report, which is no longer fit for purpose, applicants have more freedom to show how the final application has taken feedback into account. The new approach implied by the Bill – summarising how feedback influenced the project in a concise way – will help build trust and transparency with both communities and technical stakeholders, by creating a document which is easier to navigate and focused on feedback, not evidence of delivery.  

3. Balancing risk and applying proportionality: While embracing the flexibility that the new Bill will provide, the basic principles of fair public consultation should of course remain. When developing an engagement strategy, developers will need to take into consideration a range of factors including, the community it is looking to consult, the nature of the project and the projects’ overarching risk profile. These factors will then help to determine what a proportionate approach to consultation looks like. Proportionate should mean different things for different projects and different sectors. The key here is balancing the size, scale, benefits and impacts of the project against the profile and information needs of the local community.  

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill heralds an exciting, new chapter for engagement and community consultation. Behaving as a reset, it creates the space to break away from formulaic, tick box engagement and instead provides the opportunity to develop practices that are more agile and meaningful to communities, landowners and stakeholders.  

By leveraging proportionate strategies, embracing dynamic and tailored engagement, and focusing on the quality of interactions over quantity, community consultation in this new regime can be better delivered for the people it’s intended to reach.  

For more advice on how these changes will impact consultation on Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) contact our Infrastructure and Energy team.