Orbit Communications has organised and supported hundreds of community consultations for developers as part of their pre-application consultation process. Covid-19 demands innovative responses and could signal some permanent changes for the planning process.
The point of community consultations is to let as broad a demographic as possible feed into planning proposals. It’s simply untrue to say that there’s nothing a resident can do to voice their thoughts or to say that they won’t be listened to anyway. There’s an information ecosystem that residents, stakeholders and developers can contribute into to shape policy and decisions.
So how best to take that forward? Face-to-face interactions and public exhibitions are valuable. But websites are the critical component that isn’t mandatory but is certainly good practice. If a leaflet drop is issued to the surrounding area to invite people along, it can be made doubly stronger with a weblink for those who can’t make it, reinforced with social media. Any additional route for feedback can only be positive, and certainly never more so than now.
What Orbit Communications has recently introduced is a bespoke chat functionality to tailored websites. All members of the team can interact with visitors who log onto the site and request to speak – just as they would a face-face community exhibition.
There are many benefits to this. A digital interaction allows the team to respond faster, pool their knowledge more quickly and – with the permission of visitors – keep track of respondents to follow-up with. Digital exhibition boards allow for a slicker and more accessible view of all information to hand. Team members can also follow-up with guests if there are any questions that couldn’t be answered at the time.
It’s unlikely face-to-face interactions at community exhibitions will disappear. Nor should they. But Covid-19 has shown that most people not only use the Internet but rely on it. It’s encouraged a new wave of digital integration and participation; a longer felt impact might well be that a new expectation is placed on developers and planners to have that digital feed-in for residents, constituents and interested parties.
With the Scottish Government expected to announce new guidelines for how to conduct planning application consultations in the current Covid-19 climate, we have to wonder – is this the beginning of something new altogether?