Budgeting a public exhibition for a major scheme

A public exhibition for a major scheme is an evidence-gathering exercise with a budget attached, and the budget should be set by what the submission has to prove rather than by what the venue costs. The document it produces is a Statement of Community Involvement, and its value at committee depends entirely on whether it can show who was reached, what they said, and what changed as a result. An exhibition that produces a photograph of a well-attended room and no analysis has spent money without buying anything.

There is no general statutory duty on an applicant in England to consult the community before submitting. What there is, on most major schemes, is a local expectation: the authority's own statement of community involvement, its validation list for majors, and the practical reality that a scheme arriving at committee with no record of engagement attracts a different reception from one that arrives with one.

What the consultation has to achieve

Work backwards from the submission. Four things need to be demonstrable.

Reach. Who was notified, by what method, and how many people that represents against the population of the area consulted. A leaflet drop to 1,200 addresses is a number. "The local community was informed" is not.

Opportunity to respond. The channels available, the period they were open for, and whether someone without internet access or with limited mobility could take part.

What was said. The responses, categorised by theme, with the volume behind each theme stated rather than characterised.

What changed. The specific design or operational changes made in response, and the matters raised where no change was made with the reason given. This is the part that carries weight and the part most often missing.

Everything in the budget should serve one of those four. If a line item does not, it is marketing rather than consultation, and it should be justified on that basis instead.

Venue, materials and staffing

The cost drivers, rather than the costs, which vary too much by location and scale to generalise:

• venue hire, driven by the day of the week, the duration, the capacity and whether the space needs to be accessible and available in the evening
• notification, which is usually the largest single line on a major scheme, driven by the number of addresses and whether the drop is by distributor or by post
• display material, driven by the number of boards, the quality of the visualisations and whether verified views or a physical model are produced
• staffing, driven by the number of sessions and how many of the design team attend each
• response capture, meaning printed forms, a tablet or two, and someone to transcribe
• accessibility provision, including an induction loop, translation where the area needs it, and a large-print version of the boards

Two judgement calls set the total more than any other decision. The number of addresses notified, because notification scales linearly and everything else does not. And whether the scheme produces visualisations for the exhibition or reuses material already prepared for the application, because high-quality verified views are a substantial line in their own right and are often already being produced for a townscape assessment.

Where visual material is being prepared anyway for the application, co-ordinate the two so the exhibition uses the same views. Producing two sets at different stages is a common and avoidable duplication.

Digital consultation and its own costs

A project website with a feedback form is now standard, and it is not free.

The cost sits in four places: building and hosting the site, producing material in a format that works on a phone, moderating and responding to submissions, and the data handling arrangements, because a consultation collecting names, addresses and comments is processing personal data and needs that handled properly.

Digital reach has a specific weakness that committee members know about. Online responses skew towards people who are already engaged and towards certain age groups, so a consultation that reports 400 online responses and 30 attendees at the exhibition is open to the criticism that it did not reach the people most affected. The answer is to run both and to report the demographic reach of each honestly rather than to merge the totals.

Where the authority holds a consultation portal or publishes the scheme on its own site at pre-application stage, use it, because a response submitted through the authority's channel is harder to characterise as developer-managed.

Recording and analysing responses

This is where consultation budgets are usually too small, and it is the part that determines the value of everything else.

The work involved: transcribing paper forms, de-duplicating responses, coding each response against a theme list, counting the volume per theme, identifying the geographic distribution of respondents, and separating comments on matters the application can address from those it cannot.

Build the theme list before the exhibition rather than after, from the issues the policy context and the site constraints suggest will arise. Then add themes that emerge. Coding to a list designed after the event invites the accusation that the categories were chosen to produce a comfortable result.

Keep the raw responses. Where an objector later says the consultation misrepresented local opinion, the raw material is the answer, and authorities occasionally ask for it.

One sensible budget line that is frequently omitted: someone independent of the design team to do the coding. The designers are the worst people to categorise criticism of their own scheme, and a third party costs little and removes the argument.

Reporting the outcome in the submission

The Statement of Community Involvement submitted with the application should be short, factual and structured so that an officer can extract what they need in five minutes.

The structure that works: a chronology of the engagement with dates, the notification method with numbers, the channels and the period open, a table of themes with response volumes, a section setting out each design change with a before-and-after reference to the drawings, a section listing matters raised where no change was made with the reason, and the raw material in appendices.

Avoid two things. Do not report support and objection as a headline score, because a consultation is not a referendum and presenting it as one invites a counting argument. And do not quote individual respondents by name or in a way that identifies them.

Where the authority's validation list requires the statement for major applications, check whether it specifies content, because some do and matching their list saves a round of comments. The report index sets out the other documents a major submission needs.

Where a second round is needed

A second round of consultation is worth its cost in three situations and not otherwise.

Where the design has changed materially in response to the first round, so that showing the revised scheme demonstrates the response was real. This is the strongest case and the one officers value most.

Where a specific group was under-represented in the first round, for example a particular street, a school community or a group of businesses, and a targeted second session reaches them.

Where the scheme has been through a design review panel or a significant policy change between rounds and the proposal the community saw is no longer the proposal being submitted.

A second round purely to improve the numbers is not a good use of the budget. Officers can tell the difference, and the volume of responses is not what carries weight.

Scaling the spend to the scheme

The proportionate answer varies by scale, and the structure to build is a tiered one.

Set the budget as a range with the notification number stated as the main variable, add a separate line for analysis and reporting, and hold a contingency for a second round that you only spend if the design changes.

For how the supporting document costs compare with the rest of the application budget, see pricing, and comparable cost mechanics are covered in full application fees by floorspace and site area and outline and reserved matters fees on a phased scheme.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.