Developing an engagement strategy

Your engagement with DM officers should be timely, consistent, structured and wellplanned. DM officers can be overstretched and might be reluctant to engage with the design coding process for lack of time and energy. This was true at Gedling Borough Council, where the lead team got the best value out of their engagement process by planning it in a way that respected and worked around DM officers’ heavy workload.

Before you engage with DM officers at any length, investigate how much capacity the team has and what options are likely to produce the best results. Communicating the long-term benefits is likely to help in persuading them to engage.

Some Pathfinders found it helpful to bring a select group of DM officers together as part of a working group for consistent monthly involvement. Structuring these meetings on specific themes was seen as a practical way to deliver good results. The DM officers involved were then able to disseminate news on progress to the rest of the DM team.

At the Lake District National Park Authority, one of the three DM officers on the project team was also assigned the role of design code ‘champion’ for the duration of the project. Their job was to report back to the DM team and to represent the DM team’s interests in the name of improving the code’s useability. This worked well and, once again, helped to raise awareness about the code in the DM department. One person on the Lake District design coding team described it as “one of the most useful things that we did.”

As part of the engagement strategy, consider how you might enable collaboration across disciplines. Different parts of an LPA sometimes have conflicting objectives and can become quite siloed, inhibiting cooperation across departments and between consultees and decision-makers. For DM engagement to work and for their critical needs to be met, these barriers need to be acknowledged and overcome. For more, see ‘Bridging siloed working’.

The team at the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council recognised this as an issue. To overcome it, they used a process called ‘consultation and peer review’ as a way to allow a deeper understanding of the primary stakeholders’ needs across disciplines.

DM officers had the chance, in a couple of iterations, to comment on initial drafts of the design code, which, as it turned out, was too long, overly technical, and not clearly communicated enough.

“They are working very hard to determine planning applications in a timely manner. We needed to be careful about how we engage with them at the right time so that we get the best value out of that engagement.”

Gedling Borough Council

The writing team gradually sought to address DM officers’ concerns by stripping back the detail to just the essentials, with the aim of producing a simple, concise planning tool that limited each coding section to a single page. For more, see ‘Writing for the reader’.

Pre-adoption code testing

Once an engagement strategy has been agreed with the DM team, it is possible to plan its precise format.

A good approach is to use ‘workshop’ sessions. This is where DM officers test the emerging code against actual or mock planning applications and, in the process, improve and refine its useability as a regulatory tool. In particular, these sessions should be used to interrogate the wording and illustrations in the code for clarity, simplicity and overall brevity.

Testing the code against an actual or mock planning application could involve using the content of the code to, for example:

• Negotiate improvements to a scheme and include the findings in a succinct pre-application response

• Write up a mock planning committee report with recommendations

• Write up a mock delegated decision

On the Lake District National Park Authority Pathfinder, a select group of DM officers agreed to join the design code working group. A small sub-group of DM officers subsequently tested the code, advising on wording, alignment with policy, suitability, and illustrations.

The engagement resulted in the code’s content being boiled down to four focus areas based on the majority of application types they deal with: new homes, house extensions, conversions, and shop fronts.

Feedback from officers showed that the adopted design code was valuable, especially in helping them to prepare planning committee reports and decision notices. For more, see ‘Writing for the reader’.