Community Consultation: a snapshot

“In consultations, people will come in, they won’t read any of the information that’s there, it’s just, I live here, is there a site near my house? And then if you say, no, they walk out. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, it’s really quite depressing. You can be standing in a village hall all day, and then one man and his dog will come in.”
(Local Development Plan Manager, Wales, Interview May 2020).

“The experience of many is that through public consultation developers focus on neutralising local opposition and doing the minimum to comply with consultation requirements, rather than genuinely working alongside communities to shape their plans.” 

Jonny Anstead, Supercharging PDR will further erode trust in planning and development, AJ, 2020

“Effective community engagement is hindered where there is a lack of clarity and transparency about the goals of the engagement, competing agendas across stakeholders within partnerships, a lack of dedicated staff and resources, and limited timelines for building trust or achieving the scope or depth of the community engagement.”

 Angela Harden, Kevin Sheridan, Alex McKeown, Ifeoma Dan-Ogosi, Anne-Marie Bagnall, Review 5: Evidence review of barriers to, and facilitators of, community engagement approaches and practices in the UK, Institute for Health and Human Development, 2015 (pg.102)

“More thought and effort needs to be put into qualitative and quantitative approaches to evaluating community engagement and particularly into user-defined outcome measures.”

Michael Blomfield and Harry Cayton, Community Engagement Report for the Health Foundation, The Health Foundation, 2009 (pg. 5)

“Community engagement has been advanced as a useful strategy for improving people’s health and as a means of enabling people who lack power to gain control over their lives – and thereby improve their own health…Whilst high on the public health care agenda, there is inconsistency in the terms used to describe it, the meanings ascribed to it, and the rationales underpinning the stated ‘need’ for it.”

Ginny Brunton, James Thomas, Alison O’Mara-Eves, Farah Jamal, Sandy Oliver and Josephine Kavanagh, Narratives of community engagement: a systematic review-derived conceptual framework for public health interventions, BMC Public Health, 2017 (pg. 2)