Reducing consultation fatigue by diving deeper into the process

Reducing consultation fatigue is becoming an urgent challenge for local authorities and communities to address. We know how passionate people are about the places they live and work. They want to have an active impact on how the world around them develops, grows, and prospers.

Unfortunately, there is a severe level of disengagement in the planning process across the UK. According to the Royal Town Planning Institute, response rates to pre-planning and local plan consultations are typically less than 3%. Despite this, schemes can move ahead using insight from incredibly small sample sizes. When this happens, we must make sure the resulting developments are truly reflective of the wider public interest, and not just of small but vocal minorities.

It’s vital that we understand the root causes of this alarming disengagement and apathy. Is it because people don’t generally understand the planning system? For many, it can be difficult to know where to find information or even how to engage with councils and developers. If it’s a struggle to access or comprehend the consultation process, can you blame people for thinking their voices aren’t being heard?

At Stantec, as planning, design, and community engagement professionals, we need to genuinely help communities by showing them how they can directly impact and add value to their areas. We have to make sure we’re asking the right questions, generating truly actionable insight, demonstrating to communities how we’ve taken on board what they’ve said.

We must use all the engagement tools and methods at our disposal to make consultations accessible and ensure the widest and most inclusive reach. Whether this is in-person, online, or via VR technology, there are more ways than ever to make engagement work hard for both communities and authorities.

Bridging the gap between communities and authorities

This is the thinking behind our ongoing work with Harlow & Gilston Garden Town (HGGT). In the last year, we’ve been working to help them increase local engagement, build trust and understanding, and develop solutions that result in better insight from their communities.

This five council partnership encompasses Harlow, together with surrounding strategic development sites in East Herts and Epping Forest Districts, meaning both Essex County Council and Hertfordshire CC are working together to deliver cross-border transformational growth and regeneration with 23,000 homes and related infrastructure.

The town recognised it needed to transform the way it engages with local people to ensure it could better understand their needs. Over the last year, the town has worked with Stantec to gather and analyse data from residents on an unprecedented scale, using a combination of methods and a hybrid approach.

As part of its Your Quality of Life project last year, HGGT worked with Stantec, The Quality of Life Foundation, Commonplace, and Rainbow Services to conduct a summer of online and face-to-face community engagement activities. The aim was to find out what the community valued about their area and to give them an opportunity to provide insight that would shape their future.

The engagement methods were significantly varied to maximise the reach of the activity. The tactics included the creation of digital comment maps, community newsletters, WhatsApp groups, targeted social media posts, visually engaging videos, weekly pop-up events, workshops, flyers, posters and drop-in sessions.

The heart of this project was ensuring people could engage in a way which felt comfortable to them. All the activities provided data back to a digital survey platform to capture people’s views on what mattered most to them about the future of their area and their quality of life.

The resulting feedback report outlined the community’s priorities. It found there was an overwhelming desire to preserve green space, to have better public transport, and to preserve and protect the local river.

As well as offering an incredible picture of people’s values and priorities, an interesting find from the project was how strongly the public felt about having clearer and more direct lines of communication to the council as well as their need for greater participation in decision-making.

Looking inwards

This was a clear insight listened to and taken on board by the project team. HGGT realised they needed to improve the consultation process itself across all five councils, initially by making better use of insight and by building their own internal capabilities.

Stantec supported the Garden Town in securing investment from the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, so it could embark on a new data discovery and digital solutions project.

The project, which is still ongoing, started with a series of face-to-face workshops where internal technical officers from the participating local authorities and their planning, transport, health, environment, and GIS/ICT teams shared the challenges they faced during the consultation process.

The research explored how they currently managed consultation data, allowing Stantec to outline potential solutions that will be explored in future stages of the commission. The team used AI technology, such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Large Language Models (OpenAI) to quickly digest and organise hundreds of written notes generated during the sessions. The resulting insights were then organised and shared via an intuitive online dashboard outlining priority areas that would support HGGT in improving their own consultation capabilities.

The next stage of the project will look at how different HGGT stakeholders, namely the community, elected members/councillors and developers make use of consultation data and understand how we can use their preferences to positively influence engagement. This will help us ensure important messages are reaching and resonating with people, in the right places, in the right formats.

At Stantec, we’re increasingly seeing more value in taking a quantitative and data-driven approach to consultation alongside face-to-face sessions. To reduce consultation fatigue, we need to show people we can meet them in their comfort zones.

By doing so, we can demonstrate that we are listening, that we are actively involving an inclusive section of the community in the decision-making process, that we are respectful of their views, and that these opinions have a genuine impact.

Our work with Harlow and Gilston Garden Town is already providing us with invaluable information about the community and how we can revolutionise the consultation process. If you want to find out more about the future and outcomes of this project, visit the HGGT website, https://hggt.co.uk

Andy Porter is head of digital services at Stantec