Mike Saunders is CEO of Commonplace
The government’s Planning & Infrastructure Bill has been published, and much of the planning community appears to agree that it is needed and sensible, albeit with some of the detail to be debated.
One of the drivers of the bill has been the need for speed. In this context, there are a couple of fundamental questions I’ve been mulling over: What is the ‘purpose' of community engagement / involvement in planning when there is a stronger presumption of development? And how can technology help realise more value from the process?
Let’s start with the purpose and three strong reasons why engagement remains critical:
- The opposite of engagement is an information vacuum which will attract campaigns, and spells bad news if you’re trying to deliver 1.5M homes, whatever the planning legislation says
- The logic of the bill is to move community influence upstream from planning application to plan-making. Engagement at the plan-making stage will maximise co-design and collaboration, while also informing and de-risking the later stages of development management. But it’s only achievable if communities are continually engaged throughout the planning lifecycle. You can’t switch on constructive engagement for a year or so during a local plan and then switch it off. To the vacuum point above.
- High quality engagement leads to better understanding and better outcomes: I have seen this over and over again, and it was reinforced by research we co-produced with Landsec, Berkeley Homes and British Land in Manchester, Cambridge, Camden and Newham, that shows that strong engagement results in both better decisions and increased viability.
A community event helping to deliver better outcomes through engagement
The Planning and Infrastructure Bill sets out delegation of decisions over certain planning applications to officers. With creative use of technology, the opposite could be true: this is a moment for communities and planners to align and solve problems.
As CEO of Commonplace, I have overseen almost 15,000 engagement proposals, mostly around planning of one sort or another. There’s a noticeable trend: those that are designed (intentionally or unintentionally) to ascertain acceptance of a proposal, tend to be more polarised (and often bad-tempered). Those that do a better job of telling a story, explaining the trade-offs and then asking for feedback on how to resolve them are usually more constructive, and generate better outcomes for the project.
This is reinforced by public perception of community involvement in planning, frequently reduced through the prism of social media or traditional press to ‘NIMBY’ or ‘YIMBY’. The reductionism may be politically helpful, but it does nothing for the community or planning outcomes. What I have observed through Commonplace is a strong appetite for community involvement in shaping the outcome rather than ticking the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ box. Most people are not NIMBYs or YIMBYs, they are SVIMBYs (something of value in my back yard).
Now is the right moment to grab this opportunity: do we want 1.5M homes that communities have had involvement in shaping and therefore buy into; or 1.5M homes that are produced in isolation from local people?
The challenge is that this level of involvement can be costly: planning officers may wince at the thought of the meetings, surveys and resulting data analysis that would be required. Technology can solve most, if not all of these challenges. Although not a panacea, when the right technology is put to work it can deliver extraordinary value in this area. What I’m arguing for is meaningful engagement that is enabled or enhanced by technology: let’s call it ‘Meet’.
What does ‘Meet’ look like in practice? In Surrey, tens of thousands of people were involved in shaping the funding of local projects; in Milton Keynes huge success in getting younger people involved in shaping the city plan; and in Plymouth the use of AI to streamline and cut costs in local planning.
At Commonplace, we have demonstrated that our engagement tools really rack up value for both communities and planners, and have just added an amazing set of new representative surveys and social listening through our partnership with Zencity.
We’re ready to do our part in grasping the opportunity, and would love to work with even more planners who are excited by the potential that the bill opens up: for planners and communities to Meet, and deliver housing with great outcomes for everyone.
