Statement of community involvement outline: 60-unit scheme

A statement of community involvement submitted with a 60-unit planning application is a consultation record, and it is judged on whether the record shows that people had a real opportunity to influence the scheme before it was fixed. Councils read the document backwards. They look for the section where you say what changed, and then check whether the earlier sections support it.

Two documents share the name, which causes confusion at validation. The council's own statement of community involvement is a plan-making document prepared under section 18 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, setting out how that authority will engage on local plans and applications. Yours is an application-stage consultation report. Some councils ask for it under the second name on their validation list, some under the first, and a few call it a community engagement statement. Use the council's own label on the cover.

The sections below are the shape that works for a scheme at this scale, where the recommendation engine and most local validation lists start asking for one at 50 units.

Policy basis for the statement

Open with why the document exists, in half a page. There is no general statutory duty of pre-application consultation for a 60-unit residential scheme in England, so the obligation comes from three softer places, and naming them stops an officer having to hunt.

The National Planning Policy Framework expects early engagement and treats pre-application discussion with the community as improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the system. The council's own statement of community involvement will set out what it expects applicants to do. And the adopted local plan usually carries a development management policy on engagement for major applications, which is the one to quote by number.

Where the council operates a Planning Performance Agreement or a paid pre-application service and you used it, say so here and give the reference number.

Who was consulted and how

This section is a table, not prose. For each group, record the method, the date and the number of contacts.

Plot the consultation area on a plan and put it in the appendices. A radius stated in metres is easy to check and easy to criticise, so explain the reasoning: the properties with a view of the site, the streets on the likely access route, the catchment of the nearest school. Describe the method with the same precision you would use in a survey method statement, in the way our note on writing a parking survey method statement sets out for traffic work.

Name the organisations you approached and say which did not respond. A list of invitees with blanks against three of them is more credible than a list showing only the ones who came.

Events, materials and reach

Record what people were actually shown. The fairness principles that the courts apply to public consultation, drawn from the Gunning criteria, require that consultation happens when proposals are still at a formative stage, that enough information is given for an intelligent response, that adequate time is allowed and that responses are conscientiously taken into account. Each of those four is evidenced in this section and the next two.

So set out, for each event: the venue, the date, the hours it was open, the number of attendees recorded, the boards or materials displayed and whether officers or members attended. Reproduce the exhibition boards in the appendices at readable size.

For the digital element, give the website address, the period it was live, the documents available on it and the number of feedback forms returned through it. If you ran a webinar or an online session, give the same detail.

Be honest about reach. A drop-in session attended by eleven people on a wet Tuesday is a fact, and a document that reports it plainly reads better than one that describes the same event as well attended.

What was raised, grouped by issue

Group the feedback by theme rather than reproducing every comment in sequence. Six to ten themes is typical for a scheme of this size: highway capacity and access, parking, school and GP capacity, drainage and flooding, loss of the open field, design and density, boundary treatment and privacy, construction disturbance, affordable housing tenure, and ecology.

Under each theme, state how many respondents raised it, summarise the substance in two or three sentences, and quote one or two representative comments verbatim. Redact names, addresses and any other personal details from quotations and from the appendices.

Resist the temptation to answer the point here. This section reports. The next section responds. Mixing the two makes it look as though the response was written before the comment.

How the scheme changed in response

This is the section that carries the document. It works best as a before-and-after table with a drawing reference against each change.

Cross-reference each change to the drawing revision that contains it, and make sure those revisions are the ones submitted. Officers do check. A statement claiming a layout change that is not on the submitted plan is worse than no statement at all.

Where the change was already intended for other reasons, say so. Claiming credit for a fix the highway authority required anyway is the kind of thing a well-briefed objector will point out at committee.

Issues not accommodated and why

Every consultation produces requests a scheme cannot meet, and a document that pretends otherwise loses credibility. Take the three or four largest and answer them properly: the request, the reason it cannot be met, and the policy or technical basis for that reason.

Objections to the principle of development on an allocated site belong here, answered by reference to the allocation and the plan-led starting point. Requests for fewer dwellings than the allocation or density policy supports belong here too. So do requests for infrastructure that falls outside what a planning obligation can lawfully secure, where the tests in the Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010 give you a clean answer.

Keep the tone level. This section is read by the people who made the requests.

Ongoing engagement commitments

Set out what happens after submission and after any permission. A liaison arrangement with the parish council during construction. A commitment that the construction management plan will be shared with neighbours before work starts. A named point of contact for the construction phase. A commitment to consult on reserved matters or on the discharge of design-related conditions.

Only offer what the applicant will actually do. These commitments get written into committee reports, and occasionally into conditions.

Appendices and the evidence trail

The appendices are the proof. Include the consultation area plan, a copy of the neighbour letter and leaflet, the press notice, photographs of the exhibition boards, the boards themselves, the feedback form, the redacted response log, the correspondence with the parish council and ward members, and the project website pages captured as PDFs.

Number the appendices and reference them from the body text. Keep a master copy of the unredacted response log outside the submitted document, because you may need it if the record is challenged.

A statement of community involvement built this way also feeds two other submission documents. The design narrative in your design and access statement should describe the same layout changes in design terms, and the planning statement should reference the engagement when it addresses the engagement policy in the local plan. Inconsistency between the three is the most common validation query on this document.

To draft the statement and the rest of the major application pack against the policies that apply to your site, enter your postcode on PlanScope.

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