Ben Richards MRTPI is a principal communications and engagement consultant at AtkinsRéalis. Ben also volunteers for Planning Aid England.

As planning and built environment professionals, we understand the importance of timely community engagement. It helps us make better decisions that integrate community feedback into strategy, design and construction, and to mitigate negative impact whilst maximising positive impact. Good engagement also helps to ensure that development and regeneration contribute to the economic, social, environmental, and cultural well-being of local communities.

Is engagement really holding back development?

It's an interesting time to be a stakeholder engagement specialist, particularly in a planning context. Contemporary discourse may suggest a growing notion that public engagement and consultation have been a blocker to development by enabling NIMBYs (‘Not in My Back Yards’). At a national level, the UK government’s Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 seeks to streamline the planning process and support the government's economic growth initiatives, part of which removes some of the ‘burdensome statutory consultation requirements unique to major infrastructure projects.’

A report from DEMOS, supported by the RTPI, ‘The MIMBY Majority: How to unlock housebuilding with early and representative public participation in planning’ leads to a pertinent conclusion, that far from slowing down planning, early public engagement affords planners and other built environment specialists a means to streamline planning processes. The report argues that early public engagement can catalyse delivery by helping to anticipate issues earlier and de-risk later planning applications.

The research is largely in the context of government house building targets, but its conclusions are relevant across the built environment sector: to deliver any proposals successfully, engagement should and needs to be front-loaded.

There is certainly an appetite, anecdotally at least, from the public and other stakeholders for earlier engagement.

The best of community engagement

In my capacity as a Planning Aid England volunteer, I recently participated in a community engagement workshop organised by the planning policy team at Birmingham City Council as part of its Local Plan consultation process.  The workshop was for members of a local residents’ steering group and stakeholder partnership, and my role was to facilitate discussion and offer advice as an independent and impartial planning professional. The topic for discussion was a draft housing regeneration policy for the local area, itself part of a larger Focused Preferred Options Document (FPOD) – a key consultation document setting out the Council’s emerging preferred strategy for the Local Plan.

The discussion sat within the wider context of housing regeneration plans in the area, where significant redevelopment and investment are proposed, and where there are known concerns from local residents about how this may affect them and their communities.

Concerns were fairly voiced throughout the engagement workshop, and I was extremely impressed with how pragmatic and fair attendees were. With a brief to discuss a specific question set in relation to the draft policy, which included questions on specialist housing requirements, new facilities and services needed, and green and blue infrastructure planning, I saw the best of community engagement. Residents and other stakeholders represented their communities as a whole and were warm, amenable and prepared to work collaboratively, even with wider concerns for the area (and their own livelihoods).

Getting the balance right

My experience also served to re-emphasise the need for a balance between digitisation and in-person engagement. Digital tools, such as visualisations, 3D interactive models and online spaces, are needed to support good and broad engagement. We, as a profession, need to do more in this space to make complex planning matters more accessible, and digital tools will help us re-enfranchise people in the long term. Digital tools and visual aids will help people to understand what is being proposed and its likely impact on them.

But there is no replacement for face-to-face, quality conversation with people – the type of which I experienced in Birmingham. As we increasingly look towards digitisation, it’s also important to remember that the quality of conversation should not and cannot become a lost art.

Going forward

The planning profession is filled with passionate, committed people who care deeply about communities; it’s one of our strongest assets. Face-to-face engagement provides an opportunity to showcase this widely, and it will be the reason, I believe, that communities strengthen their trust in us in the long term. If we can blend verbal and visual communication with in-depth technical expertise and insight, we can identify what matters most to communities, and truly shape projects to deliver better planning and design outcomes for everyone, both now and in the future.