PRE APPLICATION COMMUNITY CONSULTATIONS

ADAPTING TO AN ONLINE APPROACH

Pre-Application Community Consultation (PACC) has been enshrined in the planning process for Major Developments since the Planning Act came into force in April 2015. PACC requires developers and their agents to engage with the local community and share with them preliminary proposals, and to take on board any feedback received before formally submitting a planning application. Fundamental to the PACC is the consultation event. This is explicitly identified as an in-person event in the Planning Act.

As with many facets of the Northern Ireland planning system, community consultations felt the shockwaves of the lockdown and social distancing requirements introduced to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. These measures required the Department for Infrastructure to be agile and innovative in finding a workable solution where in-person meetings were no longer possible, but where the wheels continue to turn in progressing major development proposals through the planning process.

On 1st May 2020 Regulations were introduced that suspended the legal requirement to hold a community consultation in-person, and instead require that consultation be undertaken electronically. Rather than prescribe how this would be done, the Regulations guided developers to engage with the relevant local Council and agree a strategy for undertaking this. Whilst this approach has not been perfect in practice, Councils have engaged positively, the new system is working and the Department’s swift action to avoid a bottleneck in the system is to be commended.

On 1st May 2020 Regulations were introduced that suspended the legal requirement to hold a community consultation in-person, and instead require that consultation be undertaken electronically.

Our experience has been that Councils have generally taken a cautious approach to the amount of notification to local communities in these unprecedented times, insisting on significantly more notification of the public, and particularly those close to a site, than was typically necessary pre-COVID-19.

There is also an expectation that, as consultations now take the form of online booklets, the consultation will go on for a longer period. Typically, in-person consultations are a single day, whereas online consultations are usually expected to stay available for viewing and comment for 1 – 2 weeks. Clyde Shanks has undertaken a number of community consultations for Major Developments across NI in the past six months and some of these can be found on our webpage www.clydeshanks.com. These have covered a variety of development types in locations across the Province. We negotiated the structure of the consultations with the local councils. For a proposed housing development at Gransha Road in Bangor we neighbournotified over 160 properties.

That has been successful in generating significant local interest, including from local politicians. As many as 80 responses were received from local residents to the Bangor consultation. This level of engagement and feedback was helpful in shaping both the proposed development and the supporting information accompanying the planning application.

Whilst it is anticipated that in-person community consultation events will return in the future when circumstances allow, important lessons have been learned in the move to on-line consultation and these are likely to remain in some form given their success during the current pandemic.