As the United Kingdom faces substantial changes to its planning system what is, or what should be, people’s involvement in planning? The potential for effective consultation has never been greater. Opportunities for communities to shape the built environment were markedly increased when the introduction of Neighbourhood Planning in 2011 gave local community groups an opportunity to create a shared vision for their neighbourhood. Channels of communication are evolving rapidly, allowing increasingly effective two-way communication, and the development industry itself is moving towards greater transparency, specifically in relation to social value.

It is within this challenging and changeable environment that development teams work with local residents and community groups to refine and enrich proposals, to gain support and, ultimately, achieve planning consent. Possibly the most important question for practitioners devising consultation strategies is what content, or topics, the consultation must address.

And yet, there is a distinct absence of guidance to assist development teams in determining the content of a planning consultation. Advice and best practice, where is does exist, tends to focus on methodologies, research and analysis. Although developers and planning consultants routinely meet local authority planning officers in ‘pre-app’ meetings to discuss the process of a planning application, consultation content is rarely discussed. Consequently, this ebook focuses on the subject of consultation content for non-statutory planning consultations. It finds that an understanding of the requirements, planning consultants’ and developers’ expectations of consultation, and therefore, practice, varies considerably; that this results in ambiguity – and further fuels mistrust.