Urban Room gets a mention in the recently adopted Statement of Community Involvement by the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning

The Cambridge Room team are very excited to see the recent publication of the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning (GCSP) Statement of Community Involvement. It was only in 2004 (2015 in Northern Ireland) [1], that statutory planning’s duty of consultation has been supplemented by the requirement that local planning authorities state their ‘promise to consult’ in a Statement of Community Involvement (SCI) [2] (Wigley, 2011, p.4). Essentially, a SCI is a legally binding document which makes promises that can be difficult to deliver especially if they go above the minimum required by statute. This is what makes the GCSP Statement so significant.

When we were working on our last research project Community Consultation for Quality of Life (CCQOL) we did a literature review that revealed just how weak these Statements of Community Involvement can be and just how important they are for driving high quality community consultation.

Under-resourced Planning Officers are unlikely to commit to anything beyond the most basic, statutorily minimum forms of participation. This can herald a retreat from innovation and any attempts to work with under-represented groups. Although one of the aims of the SCI initiative was to encourage more collaborative forms of planning (Beebeejaun, 2012), but its success in achieving this has been mixed (Parker et al, 2021).

If you want to know what we mean by high quality consultation you need look no further than the Code of Practice which was another outcome of that project. It boils down to feedback loops, clear routes into action, an inclusive long term view and rigour around the gathering of data.

This is why we are so proud of our colleagues in GCSP as well as Councillors Tumi Hawkins and Katie Thornburrow, two of our inspiring Trustees, for holding out for more in terms of what they expect from an SCI. We hope this will be an example and inspiration to others to push for higher quality consultation.

We are also very delighted to see the Cambridge Room mentioned in the document (4.17) as an innovative and meaningful form of public engagement. One important thing about the room is that it will be a memory for public consultation in Cambridge, enabling one consultation to learn from another through long term data gathering and work with communities across the region. Our pop up space in the Grafton Centre will be ready for action late June and we are open for business to deliver innovative and inclusive consultation services focussing on digital map making. Please spread the word.

Download the Statement of Community Involvement here.

@PMP project. @CAA

[1] The Planning Act (Northern Ireland) 2011 places a statutory duty a council to prepare a statement of community involvement, and in 2015 new reforms were introduced which enacted the 2011 Act.

[2] The Planning & Compulsory Purchase Act (2004) relates to England, Wales and Scotland

References:

Beebeejaun, Y. 2012, “Including the Excluded? Changing the Understandings of Ethnicity in Contemporary English Planning”, Planning Theory and Practice, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 529-548.

Parker, G. , M. Dobson, T.Lynn (2021), ‘Paper Tigers’: a critical review of Statements of Community Involvement in England, Civic Voice, http://www.civicvoice.org.uk/uploads/files/SCI_Research_Final_Report_Oct21.pdf?dm_i=5ZTJ,CNCU,329J3Y,1J3UU,1

Wigley, J. 2011, “Changing times: The importance of proper consultation”, Journal of Planning and Environment Law, no. 11, pp. 1447-1454.