Introduction

Our city council partner’s new Local Plan aims to address local housing needs, economic growth, environmental considerations, and strategic infrastructure, while also supporting the council's goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2030.

Challenges

As part of the Regulation 19 stage, the council faced not only the challenge of analysing and summarising nearly 5,000 comments across over 140 policies but of getting the responses into the required format for the Planning Inspectorate. The responses were gathered via their digital engagement platform, emails and a handful of handwritten letters. Following the consultation, the council needed to quickly collate all representations and prepare two key outputs:

A searchable database of all representations.
A summary of responses for the Regulation 22 Statement.

The timetable was critical as the Plan needed to be submitted prior to changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which could have caused major delays or even reworking the whole plan.

Solutions

Following a successful trial on the Regulation 18 representations, The Future Fox was commissioned to analyse the responses to the Regulation 19 consultation. However, it soon became apparent that there were significant advantages to the council in asking The Future Fox to prepare the searchable database. Doing so ensured that individual points of representation were consistently numbered in both the database and the summaries, as required by the Local Plan Guidance for Programme Officers.

The Future Fox team created the searchable database, the summaries, and the narrative reports within a week, giving the council the time they needed to review and submit the data. The database was delivered a few days thereafter and met the Planning Inspectorate’s data requirements. A publicly available version of the database was published and is available online.

Results

The summaries generated by The Future Fox were also put to good use, providing an initial output that could be easily reviewed and signed off by decision makers. These summaries formed the basis of Part 2 of the council’s Regulation 22 Statement.

The council noted that the tight timelines for the analysis would have proven impossible without the assistance of The Future Fox.

“The team found this process extremely helpful in meeting an extremely demanding timescale for the project…overall this was a very positive experience for the team.”

Principal Planning Officer