Simon Creer is Communications and External Affairs Director at the Royal Town Planning Institute

It happens to us all the time. The phone pings, and the little green symbol pops up with yet another message from a WhatsApp group.

You shuffle through the mental roller decks to fit the name on the screen to the relevant group. Is it the primary school parents’ group (official or unofficial); is it the book group you haven’t attended for six months; is it the sports team you sporadically play with; or is it a family emergency? It turns out it’s the neighbourhood group. Barry’s moaning about the bin men again.

This is an all too familiar pattern of modern life, and sadly one that planners need to be aware of.

Communities are networked together through multiple overlapping WhatsApp groups that are unmonitored and unmonitorable. They have slippery reasons for being, sometimes unknown members and various busy bodies who dominate the conversation, but can also share information at incredible speed that could be really important for the kids’ next day at school, the local market, or transport disruption.

You’ve all seen the ‘forwarded multiple times’ note on messages. Usually, it’s a corny meme that your gran might have pushed on, but sometimes they can be more sinister.

Reports from recent unrest on the street have indicated that these groups are being mobilised to share angry messaging and draw people into action.

Professor Andrew Chadwick, professor of political communication at Loughborough University, told Full Fact, while discussing the riots following the Southport stabbings, that false information soon ends up in personal messaging applications such as WhatsApp, where it can circulate in smaller groups, often local and perhaps friend and family networks.

What’s worse is as these groups proliferate, you have less of a clear connection to the members of that group, but you pay closer attention to personal messaging than you do social media. Messages in groups like that seem more targeted and more appropriate to you precisely because it’s a direct message… kind of.

And anyway, it’s not like you’re going to take to the barricades with Barry and his bin antics. But then you don’t know who else in the group might and how soon you might find yourself behind rudimentary barriers pleading to be let out to pick up the kids from school.

This is the new substrate of our comms environment. Every message planners put out has the potential to be pulled down, spun inappropriately and then circulated around endless WhatsApp groups faster than the speed of sound.

This, in many ways, is how the theory of 15-minute cities ran away from us all.

So, with consultation and communication at the heart of every planner’s role, how do we counteract this?

Awareness is the first key. Think about the potential vectors for your communications and consultations, and think about what could be done with them.

Transparency is the second key. Make sure that all your messaging and consultations have a public, easily understandable presence on your website. This should be where you point all audiences to and where you can begin to respond to some of the more outlandish claims you hear.

Honesty is the third key. It may seem obvious, but if planning authority communications are open and honest, then there are fewer cracks for the misinformation to sneak through.

And lastly, patience. Given that people may have been drawn into angry conversations based on false information, it may take some time to bring them around.

This won’t stop the heated and sometimes threatening conversations that our members seem to be facing with alarming regularity, but it may help to dissipate some of the rage.

But why does this matter now?

We’re about to enter the pre-election period for national and regional elections, where tempers are going to be heightened, and stories may emerge out of nowhere. We are likely to end up with the most politically diverse landscape the UK has ever seen, where knowing how information and misinformation travels will become increasingly important in a public-facing role like planning.

But, as the political temperature rises, the ability to communicate calmly, clearly and credibly may be one of the most important skills in a planner's arsenal.