Local plans need more and better engagement

Olivia Gibson is a Policy and Data Analyst at the RTPI

Today we published our communications in planning white paper, a collection of essays by built environment practitioners about how and why to build trust with local communities through better engagement. The reason for undertaking this work is the often low level of engagement with planning across the UK, as Simon Creer, Director of Communications, outlines in his foreword. This lack of engagement with planning has been demonstrated by figures from YouGov and DEMOS. However, we had not previously quantified the level of engagement with local plans, which are the backbone of our discretionary planning system. As part of the work that went into the white paper, we collected data about public engagement on local plan consultations across the UK.

UK-wide

At a UK-wide level, we found that responses to local plan consultations ranged from 0.01% of an authority’s population to 4.24%, with a mean of 0.56%. Median engagement was 0.33%, meaning that half of the local authorities whose engagement figures were found had a lower proportion of engagement than this.

Regional

In the nations and English regions of the UK, the mean response ranged from 0.15% in Northern Ireland to 0.92% in the East of England. Medians ranged from 0.08% to 0.54%.

As Nikki Davies outlines in the white paper, “participation in planning is still too inconsistent, too fragmented and, in some cases, unintentionally exclusionary”. Consequently, planning decisions are based on local plan policies that may not accurately reflect the wishes of residents, with increased contention the result. Improving engagement will not only help address this, and make for more productive conversations around development, but will help educate residents about how the planning system works (and how they can engage with it constructively).

Availability of data

These engagement figures were for the authorities whose local plan engagement numbers we could find - for 26% of authorities, we couldn’t find any numbers publicly. This was for a variety of reasons, including:

• A small number of authorities that had been through LGR relatively recently.
• Authorities that, it seemed, had not published their consultation numbers on their site, either in report form, or otherwise.
• Authorities that had previously published the results of their engagement, but the link had broken.
• Authorities that required you to request access to documents – which is not ideal from a local democracy and accountability angle.
• Authorities that published local plan consultation engagement reports but used unclear or jargon-heavy language.
• Authorities that published PDFs of the hundreds of responses they’d received, making no attempt to quantify or summarise them.

Nikki Davies argues in her contribution that meaningful engagement “requires clarity, accessibility and honesty from the outset”. This extends to post-engagement communications, and demonstrating to residents that their voice was heard by explaining clearly how their comments were received, whether they were actioned, and why. Publishing outputs resulting from consultation in an accessible and transparent way isn’t just important for closing that circle on engagement, but for local democracy and accountability. As Rachel Brisley posits, “when accountability is clear and results are visible”, it’s easier to build trust, and accept difficult trade-offs.

What does this mean?

While the proportion of people engaging with local plans doesn’t tell us how deep the engagement was, as a proxy, it does suggest that in a lot of places engagement could improve. This is easier said than done in a fast-moving digital age that often incentivises disengagement – something the lessons for practitioners, and innovative approaches in the white paper seek to address.

With an ongoing housing crisis, sorely needed investment in infrastructure, the new towns programme getting underway, and a new local plan system coming into force soon, it is crucial that local plans get more, and better engagement. Rachel Brisley lays out how well-done deliberation and engagement strengthens the quality and legitimacy of policies. This includes – as advocated by Dr Bonnie Kwok – designing for inclusion from the outset, ensuring groups that are usually underrepresented in planning decisions can have a say. Good, representative engagement means local plans will consist of widely popular policies, pass examination with less complication, and produce places that are an accurate reflection of the needs and wants of residents.

Methodology

To reach these figures, we carried out desk research to identify the number of written responses received during local plan consultations by local planning authorities across the UK. We used figures as reported in Regulation 22, or regulation 18 and 19 reports in England, and their closest equivalent local plan consultation reports in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

To allow comparability between authorities, the analysis focused on written responses to local plan consultations. Where figures were available across more than one consultation stage, we calculated the mean number of written responses received across those stages. This figure was then expressed as a proportion of the relevant local authority population, using the 2024 mid-year population estimates.

The research used the most recent available local plan consultation data for each authority, meaning the dataset includes a mixture of current, emerging and withdrawn local plans. We found that engagement figures were publicly and accessibly available for 73.9% of planning authorities. For the remaining 26.1%, we were unable to identify a figure for reasons including consultation reports not being published, broken links on council websites, plans still being prepared following boundary changes, and unclear or inconsistent wording within consultation reports. The figures should therefore be understood as an estimate of written response rates to local plan consultations, rather than a measure of all forms of public engagement or the number of unique individuals who participated.