Local Development Framework Consultation

South Lakeland District Council – Statement of Community Involvement (SCI)

It is of interest to me as I write this response to the invitation to comment upon the draft Statement of Community Involvement that since the consultation widow opened on the 26th July, some 23 days ago that only 4 parties have submitted comments. Of these 2 are from what I consider to be statutory consultees and 2 are from members of the public. There will perhaps be a rush of comments in the remaining 21 days of the consultation period. This response suggests a couple of things to me:

• The general public are becoming apathetic in connection with planning matters unless it directly effects them. There have after all been a raft of consultations over the last 5 years.
• The invitation to comment is not being communicated effectively so that people are aware that they have an opportunity to submit comments that will be considered by the Council.

Our experience as a landowner involved in the formulation of the recent Development Plan Document (DPD) and Land Allocation Document (LAD) is that the wider population were not generally aware of the consultation process, or if they were, did not engage with the process for a number of reasons:

• They were not immediately effected by proposed land allocations
• They did not understand the process or what the Council was seeking to achieve
• They did not think that their views would be considered by the Council
• A lot of the process was considered to be web based which a lot of people were not comfortable with

In section 2 of the draft SCI the Council acknowledges that there has been a shift to online services and correspondence by email and social media. Not all of the population are comfortable using such mediums to make their thoughts known. This is also acknowledged in Section 2 and it is suggested that the Council will continue to ensure that consultation materials are available in a number of formats. My experience of the public meetings in connection with the DPD was that they were not particularly well attended and that many people were not aware of the meeting. A number of parties who were aware of the meetings were of the opinion that it was pointless attending as “the Council would do what it wished anyway”. It was for this reason that we withdrew several sites from the DPD process as were not comfortable that the neighbours were aware of the process or if aware they felt that it was not worth submitting their comments.

Somehow the Council needs to encourage more engagement through creating greater awareness of the process and that creating a level of trust that the comments of the public will be given due consideration. I suggest that the Parish Councils are ideally placed to assist in this process.
Other specific points from the draft SCI are:

Section 4.13. In connection with local heritage assets I suggest that the Council should consult with the owners of such asset initially as they are not mentioned in this section.

Section 5.12. I see little point in having a notification period if the Council will take account of representations outside of this period. This simply adds further delay to the planning process, which is frustrating for individual applicants as well as larger developers some of whom are finding the planning process in SLDC more difficult that other council areas. If the Council wishes to deliver the sites allocated within the current DPD and encourage engagement in the revisions thereto the planning process needs to improve.