Reflections on engagement and the proptech industry

I sat in on a webinar today run by the DLUHC proptech team showcasing projects from round 1 of the Proptech Engagement Fund. The aim of which is to encourage local authorities to pilot potentially innovative and gamechanging methods for using digital tools to increase and streamline engagement with the planning process. When I was at GCSP my fantastic colleague Nissa won funding from the round but unfortunately we were too far along with the Local Plan consultation work I was doing for that to be eligible, which was a shame. But we had already been piloting a lot of really interesting digital and hybrid approaches over the previous two years so it was with interest that I tuned in to hear what I could learn from others.

There were great case studies and it was also good to hear the LPA officers involved being very frank about the downsides as well as the upsides. But one thing that was barely mentioned was what was actually done with the increased amount of feedback, the more streamlined data gathering, the clicks and comments. What tangible difference was it making to the way that planning policy or planning applications were made or assessed? It's really important - if anyone in the community is to retain trust in consultation and engagement in any way - to remember that the point of talking to people and getting them to feed back their thoughts, insights and data, is to actually do things differently as a result. I really wanted to hear more about whether officers (and local politicians) changed their minds, developed things differently, made different decisions as a result. Consultation should be about having impact, not having your say (my most loathed phrase).

The long-toothed old sceptic in me says that the reason we didn't hear about the impact of these new methods on actual decisions, was because there really wasn't any. As I've said before, when weighed up against all the other material planning considerations, there's rarely anything that in community comments that adds to the sum of already known considerations about that particular topic. And (it can't be said enough) consultation is not a referendum, so you can't make decisions just because hundreds or thousands of people preferred A over B. (It was also said quite honestly by a number of participants in the webinar that the digital tools didn't shift the demographic representation among respondents at all. Young people and those from economically underprivileged backgrounds still don't take part, for totally unsurprising reasons.)

The people who do participate, whether in simple online polls or more complex methods, do so because they want to have an impact. They want plans and policies to be changed as a result; they want applications to be understood differently in light of their comments. If we are really just wanting to communicate better - ensure it is easier to find out what is proposed in a planning application or what sites are being suggested in a Local Plan - but we don't believe that any comments from the public will really make any difference to outcomes - we'd better be more honest about this. There's nothing more likely to sow disappointment and anger among communities than being invited to spend time commenting on something, and to see nothing change as a result.

For sure it is a difficult message to give to communities- to say that there's little point in them leaving any comments. A more positive, but difficult, message would be to say that it's only worth commenting if you genuinely will be adding something new to the analysis of the problem. This kind of really useful insight is far easier to obtain through conversation rather than an online form. In person, you can steer a person from the perhaps obvious, or the materially irrelevant, points raised, to insights that only they, with their unique individual background and experiences, can provide. These deep insights are the ones that, in my work, have really turned assumptions on their head, challenged more conventionally gathered forms and sources of data, and had an impact.

These deep and insightful conversations are rarely reducible to an online form. It's not impossible - we are currently working on a set of questions to ask in a consultation about perhaps the most challenging place in the country - but it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of design, a lot of refining and rewriting and really careful consideration. It can look surprisingly simple in the end, but it involves a fundamental refocusing of the aims of consultation towards real social research that seeks insights that only real people with real lived experience can provide. And it certainly isn't just inviting people to have their say.

The proptech industry, so focused on selling its tools to the widest possible market, risks eroding and trivialising public engagement if it doesn't ask these hard questions of itself. Shiny tools are just tools, and if they aren't used well, they can do more harm than good.