Planners need to engage with people – and government can help

COMMENT The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities recently announced the 11 UK councils from “urban and deprived areas” selected to benefit from up to £95,000 of funding through two pilot projects to boost community engagement in neighbourhood planning. It appears the expected allocation of nearly £2.5m was downweighed due to a lack of bidding from councils. DLUHC’s championing of a digitally focused agenda has been positive so far, with pilots running under the first round of the PropTech Engagement Fund. In complete contrast, these newly awarded funds – focused on providing greater simplicity – make no mention of digitisation. We all know that the current system needs an overhaul. It’s complex and it lacks inclusivity. It’s hard for anybody to understand unless you’ve spent years training in a sector specialism or navigating the complexities of planning portals and consultation. Yet planning and development impacts all our lives. Not least those for whom community spaces and services provide a lifeline. That’s why they absolutely should have a say in the decisions that impact them. It’s right for the government to prioritise local communities but, given that it has typically placed digitisation high on its planning agenda, it really seems to have missed a trick by not doing so here. There needs to be a much more sophisticated level of engagement and a concentrated effort to build trust and understanding for those who have never felt empowered, or even heard of it at all. Delivering a vision Only 2% of the public trust developers, and fewer than one in 10 trust councils to make decisions about development in their area. If citizen engagement is to be the key to a meaningful and nation-wide programme of “levelling up”, then clearly something needs to change fundamentally for these pilots to be worthwhile for councils to bid for, let alone successful. Funding alone is not the answer. Pilots like these, which promise to put communities at the heart of planning, need to go a step further in their quest for engagement. The need for greater simplicity and understanding has been clearly highlighted by these funds; what’s missing is how we achieve this. Human beings are visual creatures. We use visual information to learn, process, understand and make decisions we feel confident in, so it seems obvious that visualisation is critical to building better understanding, by offering a simplified and more accessible way to engage. The use of digital tools should have been considered from the outset as critical to the success of the two projects. Planning policy is complicated, as is articulating a vision for an area; tools like Vu.City can help reach and involve larger groups of people from all socio-economic backgrounds. Neighbourhood planning is an important part of the system, and visual tools can help a community understand impacts, shape development, and put into place planning policies that will help deliver their vision. Broader engagement Tools like Vu.City, which create highly accurate city-wide models, allow people to review current and future states of a city or town, in a way that resonates universally. They help stakeholders easily understand the impact of their proposals, democratise the process and steer us away from hundreds of pages of technical documentation. In turn, this leads to a self-fulfilling cycle: people who understand the process, engage in it, and see their opinions validated will continue to take part and encourage others to do so. Digital is not a “bolt-on” or “nice to have”, it’s a necessity for these government-led initiatives to work. With all this in mind, it’s surprising to see these pilots rolled out without a digital focus. While it’s encouraging to see more funding available, if we want broad engagement then we need to think differently about how we communicate and encourage citizen involvement. If we don’t, then why should we expect a different response, from different people, to the one we have now? Nikki Webber, strategy and policy, Vu.City