Community involvement and engagement 

 Local Place Plans should involve the community – although you will have a smaller group doing the work to pull it together, it should reflect the views of the wider community.   

Getting your community engagement right is vital – the national standards for community engagement set out good practice principles for community engagement and can be used to support the development of any engagement activities.  

You will want to make sure that your consultant provides evidence of experience of delivering consultation and engagement with links to what they have produced.   

 This evidence should demonstrate where their activities involved reaching the community using a variety of different approaches and targetting a range of community voices, particularly the most vulnerable (who are often the least heard). 

Consultants should also demonstrate clearly; how they intend to involve the community in the initial consultation phase for the plan and how further engagement will take place to confirm that the plan developed reflects the original views and opinions of the wider community.   The brief should set out that this is an expectation. 

Some of the challenges that communities report around consultations include: 

  • Consultation fatigue - think about what information you can draw from previous consultations, what new information you need, and therefore what you actually need to do. 

  • If you have recently developed a community-led action plan (CAP), you will have already consulted widely with your community around the issues that concern them.  You might want to extract the spatial elements of this to prepare your draft Local Place Plan.  

  • If you have a community-led action plan that is already well established, you might want to plan some additional community engagement activities that gather feedback from people to find out if these are still areas of concern for them or facilitate conversations around anything you think might be missing.  For example, if your CAP doesn’t mention climate change, you might want to have a conversation around projected changes in your local community, extreme weather resilience etc and what you think could/should be done around adaptations to local spaces to reduce any negative impacts. 

  • If there is no community-led plan or it is out of date, you may think it best to carry out a full community consultation around place – this wider consultation could inform both a local place plan and community led action plan. 

 Even if there’s little you can take from recent consultations, acknowledging that you have drawn on them can help communities see that you’re connecting the dots, and this isn’t duplication.   

This information may help inform a clear consultants’ brief, and copies of any materials used can be gathered together at the briefing stage, ready to pass to the successful consultant.  

  • People feeling that they’re consulted but that nothing ever changes - think carefully about what you are prepared (and able) to take on regarding work and actions to address needs identified, and structure your community engagement around this.   

 The statutory function of Local Place Plans is to influence local development planning.  As soon as you start talking to your community about place, they will identify a range of issues that go beyond development planning.  So, before you take on a consultant, you need to think about the purpose and scope of the plan. 

  •  Is there an existing community-led action plan?  Can you feed non-development planning issues into this? 

  • If there’s no existing community-led plan, are you going to create an action plan as part of your LPP process? This should be clear in your brief. 

Development Planning  sets out the planning policy for your area and what development planners think should be allowed to happen e.g, where houses could be built, where industrial development should be allowed to happen etc.  These aren’t commitments to delivering the developments, but what they, as a planning authority think could be done to develop an area (through public, private or third sector investment). 

Developing a consultant's brief
A guide for Local Place Plans