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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 316-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: HOUSING, PLANNING, LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND THE REGIONS COMMITTEE
Tuesday 22 February 2005 MS LUCY DE GROOT and MR TED CANTLE CBE MR MIKE HAYES and MS LOUISE WARING Evidence heard in Public Questions 1-110
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee on Tuesday 22 February 2005 Members present Andrew Bennett, in the Chair Sir Paul Beresford Mr Clive Betts Mr David Clelland Mr John Cummings Chris Mole Mr Bill O'Brien Christine Russell ________________ Memorandum submitted by Improvement and Development Agency
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Ms Lucy de Groot, Executive Director and Mr Ted Cantle CBE, Associate Director, Improvement and Development Agency, examined. Q1 Chairman: May I welcome you to the Committee this morning, to the first of our sessions on local government consultation. Before I ask you to identify yourselves, may I just point out that the evidence that was in on time is now printed and is also available on the Committee website. Would you like to identify yourselves for the record? Ms de Groot: I am Lucy de Groot, the Executive Director of the Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government. Mr Cantle: I am Ted Cantle, Associate Director of the Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government. Q2 Chairman: Do you want to say anything by way of introduction, or are you happy for us to go straight to questions? Ms de Groot: Very briefly, if I might, just to explain who we are. We are the local government improvements agency, we work across all the English local authorities and also have a relationship with the Welsh LGA. We work closely with the Local Government Association which is, in a sense, the policy wing of the local government family, and we have done extensive work on a range of improvement issues with councils. We are particularly committed to the spread of best practice and from the earliest days of our predecessor organisation, the Local Government Management Board, we have worked around issues of consultation to increase democratic participation. Chairman: Thank you very much. Bill O'Brien. Q3 Mr O'Brien: How important is it for local authorities to consult people and communities on strategic issues and day-to-day decisions on the provision of local services? Ms de Groot: I think it is very important, but it is not a substitute for other things that councils need to do. Q4 Sir Paul Beresford: Like making decisions? Ms de Groot: Yes. The key thing about consultation is that we need to define it, as the Audit Commission does, as being not just about communication - which I think is one of the confusions in this whole field - but as being about consultation that leads to decision-making. One of the things that becomes a problem is where councils rightly want to inform their publics and they confuse that and pretend, if I can use that word, or mislead people to think that actually they are consulting with their publics, because consultation, it seems to me, has to link to decision-making. Q5 Mr O'Brien: Let me put an example to you then. If a council wanted to close a public library in the community, do you think it is incumbent upon the council to consult with the people, the users and the stakeholders? Ms de Groot: I do, and there is quite a lot of experience of what are quite often difficult consultations around changes in service delivery, sometimes driven by financial pressures, sometimes driven by changes in usage. I had experience myself in an earlier life, where I was a local authority chief executive, where we did exactly that, consulted around the change of use of libraries because the use of some of those libraries had fallen off dramatically, and we thought we could better organise the library service and actually end up providing more services to more people by changing the pattern of library opening and library buildings. These are not easy or popular decisions to take, and as part of that kind of decision-making by councillors I think it is very important that there is consultation with users and indeed some of the people who are not using the services to find out --- Q6 Mr O'Brien: What time spell would you suggest would be reasonable? Ms de Groot: I think it is horses for courses; certainly, if you are going to be doing a consultation through very major changes of service that are going to affect people's lives, then you need to give it a good period of time. There is a kind of remit that the Cabinet Office has put out which suggests that the proper consultation period is something like 12 weeks; whether that is always possible is debatable, but the principle that you have a standard consultation time I think is right. Q7 Chris Mole: You make the point very clearly that communication is not consultation; equally would you argue the case that holding a consultation is not the same as holding a referendum and the decisions that the local authority has to make are informed by a number of strings of information, of which consultation is one? Ms de Groot: Correct. If we could keep with the libraries example, because in a way it is a very live one for a lot of us, it could be that what you were going to say as a council is you were going to consult on people's views, which you as the council were going to take account of when you came to make your decision. That does not mean that the results of the consultation were going to have a one-to-one relationship with the decision you were going to take, but what is important is that you make that clear before you start so you do not mislead people into thinking if I get 50 people out saying "I want to use the library on a Thursday afternoon" then as a result of that you will definitely keep the library open on a Thursday afternoon. It is that confusion about the role --- Q8 Chairman: Does that not develop cynicism, because if you say to people "We are consulting you, but we may not take any notice of your views from the consultation" then that makes people cynical about it. Equally, if you consult people and then take no notice it makes them even more cynical does it not? Mr Cantle: It is a case of being clear about what you are consulting on from the start. If you are going to consult on two options, to close or not to close the library, then that has got to be clear. If there are options about closing the library versus closing on a part-time basis, making it available for other uses, then again that has got to be clear from the start and I think sometimes it has been misleading because the consultation has been entirely open-ended and there is almost a pretence that any decision can be taken as a result. Getting the parameters of the consultation right at the start and being clear about what the options are, and not pretending that it is an open-ended exercise, will give a better decision in the end. Q9 Christine Russell: To what extent do you feel the extension of public consultation has actually undermined the role of the councils? Ms de Groot: I do not see it like that. I can see that in some circumstances that might be how some people might take it, but I actually think it is the reverse. There are many issues which we could discuss elsewhere about the role of local councils and the changing relationship of local councils and central Government over the last 30 years, but to me the issue of consultation links with, I suppose, a more active citizenry, you could argue a more critical citizenry and certainly a more consumerist citizenry. In that context it becomes completely unrealistic to suggest that local councils and local councillors do not need to reflect, in one way or another, that changing relationship between individuals, communities and political processes. The other thing I would say is that there are some areas of consultation, particularly when we get to issues around specific service users or particular groups in the community whose voices are often not heard in what you might call the normal, political process; well-managed consultation with the kind of parameters that Ted Cantle has identified can actually mean that you can focus and shape services to really meet better the needs of service users and potential service users. Mr Cantle: Could I just add very briefly on that that there is a danger that consultation exercises are set up separately from the democratic process, and we do give some examples in our evidence of where the consultation exercise is built around the elected members in the area, and that is particularly true in the area of committees. So it is not an either/or, you can actually reinforce the position of elected members if the consultation process includes them, and in fact we have given examples of where they chair area committees and so on as part of that process. Q10 Sir Paul Beresford: Cynics talk of consultation fatigue, and there is a feeling amongst some people that some local authorities use it as an opportunity to dodge making decisions and responsibility. Do you ever reach the position where you actually say to a local authority "You should not be consulting on this, you have enough information, you have information from your local councillors and all the rest of it, shut up shop and make a decision?" Ms de Groot: I could not give you an example just like that, but I am sure you are right that that kind of view on some issues will pertain. I also think there are some sorts of issues that, in a sense, you can only get round a consultation so many times within a kind of time period before you are kind of rearranging dates. Q11 Sir Paul Beresford: What do you say to a local authority in that situation, do you tell them "Go away and make a decision"? Ms de Groot: It is not our job to tell local authorities what to do, they are autonomous organisations, but we would certainly advise authorities that it is a law of diminishing returns and when they do need the confidence of their citizenry they will have lost it if they go on operating in that kind of way. Q12 Sir Paul Beresford: So you do not think people can keep consulting until they get the right answer? Ms de Groot: No. Q13 Mr Cummings: A survey in 2002 found that a significant minority of local authorities believed that consultation only influenced decision-making occasionally or not at all. Have you detected changing attitudes over the last few years, or do you think that if a similar survey were to be conducted today that the result would be much the same? How influential is consultation in local authority decision-making? Mr Cantle: There is a lot of evidence to say that consultation has actually increased in recent years. Partly that is because of statutory requirements, statutory requirements on housing, planning, community strategies, best value, more and more legislation and requirements; secondly, because local authorities have actually wanted to consult more as well, they have actually chosen to consult more. Almost every week in the professional journals there are more and more examples; this week, for example, in the Local Government Chronicle, Waltham Forest are using new technology hand-held devices to go out into the community and ask people to vote on particular projects, so every week almost there are new developments in the field of consultation. A survey has not been conducted this year, as far as I am aware, but I am sure if it were it would show more consultation. What is happening this year is a new thing under the Beacon Councils Scheme called Getting Closer to Communities. That will give an opportunity to see a wide range of councils applying to become a beacon council and for those schemes to be evaluated, so I think we will see more interest and increasing interest. Q14 Mr Cummings: Following on from what you have said can you provide any practical examples of good practice where the outcome of consultation has had an identifiable impact on a particular decision relating to local service delivery? Mr Cantle: In our evidence again we do give a couple of examples; obviously we can only give the evidence from our authorities, but there are a couple of good examples in our evidence. For example, Hertfordshire County Council when deciding on council priorities, an exercise in consultation actually changed their view; the local people said that actually what they wanted to see was more affordable homes as an alternative to what the council were putting forward, and that was actually a change in their priorities. There are several other examples in the evidence that we have provided to the Committee, but for the most part they tend ---- Q15 Mr Cummings: Are you saying that the decision for affordable homes went out for consultation? Is that not surely an obligation on the local authority itself? Mr Cantle: It was a consultation exercise to try and decide local priorities and the council put forward its view about what its priorities were and it was changed as a result of the consultation exercise. This is fairly strategic decision-making; I think much more mundane changes in priorities as a result of housing, planning or educational decisions go on on a day to day basis. There is evidence which we have submitted about changes in the priorities of councils as a result of consultation, but these are not systematically documented, it is left to each council itself. As I said, the Beacon Council Scheme will help us to evaluate more of those instances. Q16 Sir Paul Beresford: Have you got examples of the opposite, of the local authority that has decided before it is going to go out and set out the consultation and so forth to get the answers it wants and has not asked the questions that the public would like to see? Mr Cantle: Yes, we have. Ms de Groot: Interestingly, we have in our evidence. We think this is an important issue and we are not trying to punt a particular line. We have given the example of an authority which went out on a consultation process in relation to traffic and a major new development around a stadium - Kirklees Metropolitan Borough Council. They went through a very elaborate consultation process, they had a citizens jury, they did a whole range of things and they basically, as a result of that, put in some traffic-calming measures which were fundamentally unpopular and there was a major reaction against them, as a result of which they basically had to remove all the traffic-calming measures and it actually cost them a lot of money. The point about the story is that they had to learn the hard way that you cannot shape your consultation to the results that you want to get and, clearly, they had a number of people who thought the answer was road humps and the local people did not think the answer was road humps. That was a bit of a salutary lesson and so we give that as an example. Q17 Mr Clelland: Is not the very essence of local democracy the fact that local people are elected to come together in the town hall and use their local knowledge to make decisions? Is it not a complete negation of the whole system if they then have to go out and ask the opinion of people when they are supposed to know that, that is why they were elected; what is this all about and who does the consultation, is it a group of officers or is it the councillors? Surely the councillors who ought to be aware of public opinion and should not have to ask other people to tell them what it is? Ms de Groot: There are two strands to that question, the first one around are councillors in a sense already empowered by the electorate to take all decisions relating to the full range of services that multi-purpose local authorities have, and do they need to do any further consultation? I think it is a slightly omnipotent view, with the greatest respect, of the people who are elected. The assumption is that there is a relationship between elected politicians and quite sensitive issues around people's lives, around the nature of the care service or, indeed, the things that people feel passionate about like parking and roads. The idea that there is not any benefit in consulting with local people, particularly over time and space - because you might get elected one year and things might emerge a year or two years later and you might not have been particularly, as part of your election campaign, dealing with that issue. Q18 Mr Clelland: But councillors live in the community. You made the classic reference there to politicians; like ourselves they are people who live in the community who are elected, but immediately you start calling them politicians that immediately divorces them from the community these days. It is crazy. Ms de Groot: Not at all. What I am saying is that a lot of local councillors feel that both formal consultation and the kinds of things that councils have done from time immemorial - ward surgeries, being out and about amongst the people in their ward - are important ways of collecting information that they then use to make the formal decisions in the council. Your second point, as I understood it, which leads to the answer that Ted Cantle gave earlier, is that it is very important to be clear when you are consulting what the relationship is of the consultation to the decision-making process that councillors are rightly responsible for. Q19 Mr Clelland: What is the relationship? Ms de Groot: I think the issue of area forums, of the nature of committees - there are widespread numbers of authorities now from Birmingham, the largest single authority in England, down to small district councils - of all political complexions I should add - who are actively setting up different ways of engaging on particularly environmental service issues, with their local communities, which involve councillors as well, to the area forum, the area committee type of approach. Q20 Mr Clelland: What is the relationship between the consultation and the decision-making process? Are there identifiable mechanisms for feeding the consultation process into the decision-making process? Mr Cantle: As far as I am aware, just about every consultation exercise is then fed into the decision-making process, so it is still the councillors making the decision at the end of the day, but they have better information upon which to make that decision. When you think about the size of some electoral wards, some wards are just a few hundred people but the wards that I am used to are more like 5000 people; there is huge variation in size and scale and, in those larger wards in particular, it is often impossible - however good, conscientious and committed the councillor is - to actually get round an entire ward, let alone all the different sections, the different age ranges, the diversity of the ward. The consultation really is to make sure that all the information is available, which is then put in front of the democratically elected representatives to make the decision. It is not a substitute for decision-making, it is a way of informing the decision. Q21 Mr Clelland: Do you have any method of measuring the success of this approach? Mr Cantle: There have been one or two attempts at evaluation and, again, I have given them in our evidence, but they are very few and far between. One of the things which this Committee might precipitate is a more measurable --- Q22 Mr Clelland: We do not know whether it is effective or not. Mr Cantle: We have given four or five examples of where Local Government Association surveys have asked residents and councils about effectiveness, there have been one or two critical evaluation comments saying that it has failed to reach particular hard-to-reach groups and I think we give about five examples of attempts to evaluate whether or not it has been successful, sometimes by local authorities and sometimes by national bodies, but I would be wrong in suggesting that there has been a whole systematic review of the effectiveness. Q23 Sir Paul Beresford: If I could follow the trend here, and that is that there are mechanisms already set up for local councillors, local areas etc, so really it depends on the issue, and there are certain issues which I suspect local authorities go out and consult on, at great expense, where, if they are following the suggestions made here, they could come to the same decision with equal result etc, and should not have gone out. Have you got examples of that? Mr Cantle: I do not think there are any examples of that; I am not sure you are right to suggest that this is always at great expense because most of the consultation exercises are fairly day to day issues carried out by the housing service, by the planning service. Yes, there are costs involved in posting letters out or undertaking sample surveys or getting citizen juries set up, but these are not necessarily great expensive operations and, as we said earlier, if councils already have the information then they should take the decision on that information, there is no need to go out and consult again if you already have the information. Q24 Chris Mole: Are you saying that if it was a private sector organisation it would be part of its normal business costs to consult and to identify your markets, interests and so would not, in any sense, be considered extraordinary or excessive? Mr Cantle: That is right. Q25 Mr O'Brien: To follow that, chairman, and the fact that when the Government published their document "Public Participation in Local Government", the idea was to try and improve public perception of local government, to bring more interest and support to local government, it appears that we are going the other way. Local authorities are required by law to consult their communities in some circumstances - housing and planning issues - but to what extent are local authorities using consultation voluntarily, having regard to that aim and objective to try and improve people's support in local government? It seems to have gone the other way, with the lowest turnout in elections ever witnessed coming along now. In the voluntary sense are local authorities or local government using consultation in a proper way? Ms de Groot: I would pick up the point that Ted Cantle has already made, which is I do not think we would claim that there is at the moment a kind of rigorous assessment of where and how consultation is most effective and in what circumstances, and that might be something that ought to happen across the piece. What I would say is that there is a very big appetite for trying to use consultation more effectively; in a way the statutory requirements create a challenge because some of them can be quite onerous in terms that the expenses of full council surveys are not insubstantial, but actually they can become a crucial benchmark, the classic survey of all the residents on their views - the BVPI kind of thing every three years. That does not cost nothing, but it creates a backdrop against which I think a lot of people involved in service planning, both councillors and the officers advising councillors, feel that they do need to understand better the variety of views. If I can go back to my point about a recognition that the citizenry is quite varied and the needs of some groups are different - and the wants and the expectations of some groups are very different from others - in response to your point is there a voluntary enthusiasm to develop consultation, I think there is, particularly I would suggest in relation to service planning, whether that is about a particular service, say, for young people, or whether it is about a service with a geographical dynamic to it as in neighbourhood renewal or regeneration. More and more there is interest in the people involved in developing services to involve the users in helping plan those services and using consultation as part of doing that. Mr Cantle: There is a feeling that one way of actually addressing the declining interest in local voting is to get people involved, to consult them more and to get them interested in local politics. There is a feeling that actually if you get people involved in some of these issues about planning and service priorities they are more likely to turn out and vote in the election as a result. It is viewed positively from that point of view. Q26 Mr Clelland: Following on from what I was talking about before in terms of the effectiveness of consultation, can you say a bit more about what your role is as an organisation in supporting local government in its consultation process? Ms de Groot: In our evidence we outline some of the key areas where we support local authorities in consultation and in general principles of good practice, and I suppose there are two or three I would identify. One is that we use our website IDeA Knowledge to promote good practice and examples of good practice; in particular there has been a section called Connecting with Communities which is actually one of our most heavily used elements of the website. That is one area and we continue to put up examples of good practice on the website around a whole range of things, which consultation might be a part of rather than the main theme. The second area that Ted Cantle has already referred to is that we work closely with and service the independent Beacon Councils Panel, and one of the themes of that this year is getting closer to communities, and so we put all the evidence we get through the Beacon Councils Scheme on the website and we actively help beacon councils to disseminate their good practice, so we are doing what I would call some marriage broking around the sector. It is the beacon councils' responsibility to lead on that, that is part of what being a beacon council is, but we very much support them in disseminating their good practice and we will be doing that in the getting closer to communities theme. The third area where we are very active is around the technology, if I can call it that, of communications these days; as people will be aware there is a range of areas where there have been both Government-initiated but also local authority-initiated ways of involving people using technology, so not just things like electronic voting but the example that was given of Waltham Forest where, using hand-held devices, they can go out into the community and then get people to vote in the community about priorities. That is just an example. Q27 Chairman: If I could just interrupt, if we are going to get through all the questions that we want to ask we are going to need rather shorter answers. Ms de Groot: Okay. They are obviously about helping with technology and, finally, we are jointly working with the LGA, so I suppose making the link between notions of choice and personalisation which are quite politically of interest at the moment, and we are jointly holding a roundtable discussion with the LGA in March. Q28 Mr Clelland: How is your organisation financed? Who measures your effectiveness and how is cost-effectiveness measured? Ms de Groot: We are about two-thirds financed by the top slice of the rates support grant which the LGA agrees on an annual basis and the other third is a mixture of paid-for services from the councils and specific grants that we get from various parts of Government and elsewhere. Q29 Mr Clelland: How is cost-effectiveness measured? How do we know we are getting value for money out of your organisation? Ms de Groot: The local government community hopefully knows they are getting value for money out of us --- Q30 Mr Clelland: How do they measure it? How do they know? Ms de Groot: We provide an annual report and performance statistics to our own board - we are an autonomous company - and we provide that information to the LGA on a regular basis as well. Q31 Christine Russell: Could we talk about the type of consultation because obviously the quality of consultation varies enormously from council to council. What factors do you feel actually make good consultation? Ms de Groot: Firstly, being clear what the remit is - being clear what you are consulting about, with whom and for what purpose - and the points that have already been made about the links with the decision-making process and the kind of feedback you are going to provide to the people you are consulting with; the worst of all options is to consult with people and then they have no sense of what has happened to the consultation - which links to the consultation fatigue point - and how it is going to be used. Clarity about who, for what, and the feedback there is going to be I think is absolutely crucial. Q32 Christine Russell: What do you do in the case of a council that, quite obviously, has no idea how to go out and consult its local people? How do you intervene there, how do you give support and advice? Ms de Groot: We have a number of techniques we use. One is the kind of what I call marriage broking, we put councils in contact with other councils with a similar kind of profile - it might be a socio-demographic profile, it might be a political profile - where they can learn from good practice. We might actually work with them to bring in people who have got some particular expertise to actually help them do it and we might actually ourselves go in and help advise on a particular methodology. Q33 Christine Russell: Do you have the resources to do that? Ms de Groot: We have some resources to do that, but a lot of what our resources are about is trying to maximise resources across the sector. Q34 Christine Russell: So encouraging one local authority to perhaps second someone to go and help. Ms de Groot: Yes. Q35 Christine Russell: What more do you feel Government could do in the way of public consultation? Is there a need for Government to be doing more or to persuade local authorities to do it more or do it better? Ms de Groot: I think the Government has a responsibility on the consultation fatigue point, all governments do. Mostly what central government does is it communicates, it does not consult, and I think there is quite a lot of confusion about that. Secondly, they need to be clear what the expectations are. What often happens - and again it is all governments - is that what you might call difficult decisions are put down to local government and they are expected to consult, whereas the high level strategic, overall allocation of resources - particularly in the world of increasingly ring-fenced money - is kept with central Government. There are some quite important strategic issues, therefore, about central Government not requiring of local government what it does not carry out itself. Christine Russell: It does work the other way sometimes though, does it not, particularly with awkward planning decisions whereby the councillors decide they are not going to make the decision and send it off to the Secretary of State? Chairman: It is difficult to get a nod on the record. Bill O'Brien. Q36 Mr O'Brien: You referred to your matter of connecting with communities as a good practice tool that you have developed; can you tell me a little bit more about it? Mr Cantle: This is out of two strands really. One is that at the moment we do this via our own website, what is called IDeA Knowledge, which is really to try and make sure that the best practice of one local authority is understood by another local authority. Sometimes that is direct partnering, in other cases it is just providing information sources which they can draw upon. Just on that website alone in the last 18 months we have had 50,000 enquiries, so there is a lot of interest in that, learning from each other. Secondly, as we have said, there is the new beacon councils scheme which will be called Connecting to Communities, and that is not just about consultation - neither of these are just about consultation - it gives us an opportunity to evaluate a number of councils as part of the scheme. They are then under an obligation to go and work with, disseminate information to, all other councils. It is really about communication to councils, holding up best practice and partnering between them. Q37 Mr O'Brien: What has been the take-up then by local authorities of the business? You referred to 50,000 enquiries, those would be from councils, local authorities and business and all the rest of it; what has been the take-up by local authorities? Ms de Groot: The IDeA Knowledge website is a local government website. I am not saying that there would not be the odd individual consultancy that logged on, but those 50,000 hits are essentially 50,000 local government hits. Q38 Mr O'Brien: Are you saying that is the measure of the take-up, the 50,000 enquiries? Mr Cantle: That is one measure, but obviously we are providing all the time some practical examples to local authorities. Q39 Mr O'Brien: How many councils are involved with it at the present time? Mr Cantle: With the Connecting to Communities - I really could not say how many out of 400 odd are actively involved, but I would be very surprised if there are any authorities that have not had some level of engagement somewhere in the process. Q40 Christine Russell: Could I ask you your views on whether or not you think the Government's Code of Practice on Consultation should be made mandatory also for local government? Mr Cantle: I think what we are concerned about in local government is having more centrally driven codes of practice and targets, and what we are obviously hoping to achieve is that local authorities respond to their local needs or that they are led by their local needs. Providing that some centrally driven thing is more of a framework within which local government can operate that probably would not be such a bad thing, but if it is very prescriptive then it becomes extremely difficult because all our communities are very, very different from each other. Q41 Christine Russell: A Code of Practice that permits local variance would perhaps be a way forward. Mr Cantle: That may be a way forward, it just depends on the balance of prescription effectively. Q42 Mr Cummings: Do you believe there is an inbuilt resistance by local authorities to share ideas and experiences, and do you believe the Government should be doing more in assisting to develop, promote and facilitate the sharing of best practice? Mr Cantle: I have personally found that local authorities are extremely willing to share between themselves across party lines, across rural and urban authorities. We have all sorts of twinning arrangements and partnering between authorities; we have several thousand peers which have been accredited by the IDeA's peer clearing house to go and work in other authorities, and that is not just officers, that is members too. We have had literally hundreds of local authority councillors who have been working from one local authority in another and there is great enthusiasm for that. We find it is not just the receiving council that benefits from it, it is the council that is giving a peer, whether an elected member or an officer, which is also very enthusiastic in terms of what they learn from it. Q43 Mr Cummings: The reason I asked the question is because the Committee have been told by the FSB that "experiences demonstrate that Local Authorities often want to retain their own ideas ... and do not have any particular desire to promote their own best practice elsewhere." Mr Cantle: I have found exactly the opposite, I have to say, that most local authorities, officers and members, when they have actually got a good idea are only too pleased to have the opportunity to take it elsewhere. They get some credit for it, they get some recognition for the fact that they have developed it, so we just have not found that. I personally have been trying to get peers - members and officers - to go and work in another authority and I have never had any difficulty, in fact it has been just the opposite, that there have been a great number of people who have been prepared to give up a lot of their own free time and a lot of their own goodwill to go and do exactly that. Q44 Mr Cummings: What more should the Government do to promote, encourage and facilitate the sharing of best practice? Mr Cantle: There is already quite a lot that the Government is doing through what is called the capacity-building fund and, of course, as I mentioned earlier, the peer clearing house has several thousand elected members and officers peers which is paid for through the capacity-building fund. So they have already taken a number of initiatives to facilitate that and there is a payment system now which has been developed to also help reward councils that do give peers officer time or member time to other authorities as well. There is a fairly sophisticated system really and I think what I would like to see Government do is more of the same rather than something new. I think it is about building on the success that we already have in terms of partnering and twinning arrangements. Q45 Mr Betts: In terms of what really exercises interest among people, planning applications are perhaps one of those which create the most interest because of course they impact on whole communities. We have a major change in the legislation now in terms of local authorities' requirements of that sort; I am not sure I see any evidence of either guidance from the centre in terms of good practice or best practice initiatives being touted around local authorities for them to follow where they are coming to look at drawing up their new consultation arrangements. It does not seem to be happening. Mr Cantle: There is a great deal happening, particularly on planning. The IDeA itself has just set up the Planning Advisory Service which, with ODPM support, is intended to provide best practice in all planning work, whether that is on development control or new local development frameworks. That is also backed-up by a new portal through central Government, ODPM, which provides for new electronic processing and best practice of applications, and there is now quite a lot of advice going out on both development frameworks and development controls from both the Planning Advisory Service and through the ODPM networks. We have only just set this up, it has to be said - we set up the Planning Advisory Service late last year - so you probably will not have seen the impact of that, but it is starting to take off. We have already done regional seminars up and down the country, we have had quite a lot of local authority involvement already. Q46 Mr Betts: Have you actually documents and leaflets and things that you send out that we could have a look at? Mr Cantle: We have. It is not just leaflets - that is one of the methods we use - but it is more by way of involvement in each local authority area on a regional basis, and we are now working with different consultants who are franchised by the IDeA's Planning Advisory Service to work in individual local authorities, so they will be starting doing so. Q47 Chris Mole: Just finishing off that point on what the Government can do to facilitate sharing best practices, the beacon award system used to have a small sum of money that came with it to encourage councils to disseminate more information about what makes a beacon. Is that continuing in most places? Ms de Groot: Absolutely, and we have tried to indicate that this year the beacon council scheme will be a very important basis for us to do a lot more dissemination. Can I just answer on the Government point very briefly, if I might, and it links up with an earlier question from Christine Russell, which is what the Government can do is flag up the range of good practice that does exist, working with us and others, and indeed it links to Clive Betts' point about planning actually. Sometimes the Government passes legislation, it produces policy guidance and then that is it and it is kind of like go out and do it, and then they say it is not happening very well. It ought to be more of an iterative process so that actually the practices as they develop or the examples are given, not that this is the only way to do it but that the guidance actually becomes guidance which is based on practice rather than purely designed in Whitehall, if I can put it that way. That is one of the ways in which the Government could be more positive about some of this. Q48 Christine Russell: Could I ask you about the impact of the cabinet system? Has that had a negative or a positive impact on consultation? Ms de Groot: I do not actually feel confident to say that I could isolate specifically the relationship of the introduction of the cabinet system to the development of consultation, that would be a piece of work you would need to do. I suppose what you could say is that the decision-making within the council becomes clearer through the cabinet system, but how you got to that decision and whether the relationship of the decision-making to consultation has changed and in what way I would not feel confident to say. Q49 Christine Russell: It may be clearer within the council but is it not often muddier out in the local communities where local ward councillors can - I am not saying they always do - say "It is not my responsibility any more, all decisions are now taken by the cabinet"? Ms de Groot: I think the issue about the relationship of non-cabinet members to the decision-making of the council and their relationship to things like the development of area forums that we were talking about earlier, you would need to really look at that and I think one of the reasons why there has been probably quite a development across parties as I was saying earlier of area forums and area committees - encouraged by the ODPM, but I think genuinely being developed by councils - is partly because there is a recognition that maybe there is a gap between the cabinet decision-making and decision-making about more local things that the councils need to be more directly involved in. Q50 Chris Mole: Is there not a problem that councils have parallel roles that can be seen as conflicting by members of the public, so an executive might quite properly want to support strategically a regeneration programme, but the quasi-judicial planning decision-making process is sitting separately, and those two might be seen to have separate functions, but the members of the public would just see it as "the council"? Ms de Groot: Yes. Mr Cantle: That is true. Some of those tensions have been evident before the cabinet system though. Q51 Mr Clelland: Are you saying that you have not measured or perceived any great difference between the consultation practices of local authorities with different kinds of structures? Mr Cantle: That is right. I do not think anybody has attempted to relate particular consultation practices to particular democratic structures, and if you look at the examples we use they vary from some that have cabinet structures to smaller councils that still have an existing system and so on. Q52 Mr Clelland: It varies. Mr Cantle: Yes. We are not aware of any particular relationship; that does not mean that it does not happen, but nobody has actually done that piece of work to test whether it exists. Q53 Mr Cummings: How great do you think the potential is for Scrutiny Committees in local authorities to play a strong role in consultation, and have you any idea what proportion of Scrutiny Committees already do so? Ms de Groot: There is a role for Scrutiny Committees looking at consultation and I know that a number have done that. I cannot offhand give you the figures, but I am sure we could give you some evidence outside of this hearing about those who have done it at the moment. I am aware that a number of scrutiny panels have indeed looked at consultation and have commented to councils as to the value of consultation and the way that that council carries it out. Q54 Mr O'Brien: Can I draw your attention to the evidence that has been submitted, particularly the evidence of the Federation of Small Businesses, in which they say: "Consultation is often perceived to be little more than a public relations exercise by local authorities ... It is often felt that consultation has a negligible effect ... It is also clear that in some instances of planning consultation the public do not trust information provided by the Council and the developer." How do you combat that kind of cynicism? Mr Cantle: Inevitably there is always going to be a bit of cynicism about the consultation process; that is particularly true in the case of planning where, often, the developer's information is at odds with the information coming from other sources. Local authorities often have to try and balance the two and if they make a decision one way the developer will criticise them, if they make a decision in another then the protesters or the people objecting to the application will also criticise them. Those tensions are always inherent in the process and I am sure that in some cases consultation has been carried out badly and not with the best intentions. Obviously, what we have tried to do in our evidence and I think what the authorities have done in putting information on the website is to try and at least show where consultation has been carried out with the best intentions and has been carried out well, but there will always be cases where that sort of cynicism exists. Q55 Mr O'Brien: Is there a difference between a presentation by officers or by elected members because both have a different role to play in their communities? Ms de Groot: Of course they do, but I think the thing that is really crucial in some of the statutory consultations around planning - and I am sure you are going to be taking evidence separately around the details of planning which I would not claim to be an expert on - is that the role of officers in providing professional advice needs to be very carefully worked through. It is rather different from the role of officers in consulting around, for instance, planning play facilities in an area for children. In both cases you would expect the officers to work purely professionally and to advise councillors in an open way, but clearly when they are providing advice under the planning legislation they need to be very careful that they are doing it appropriately against the development plan and the rest of the statutory framework. Q56 Christine Russell: We all know how easy it is for special interest groups to hijack the consultation process and often scupper what in fact are good, socially beneficial projects. What advice do you give to local authorities of how to engage and consult with the wider public and particularly, perhaps, those groups who are quite hard to reach like, for instance, young people? Ms de Groot: One of the things that we say in our evidence - and we have not explored it in great detail now but I think it is important - is that there are different ways of consulting different kinds of groups and, which goes back to your earlier question, being clear who you are trying to consult about what, and indeed the different kinds of consultation mechanisms that you might use for the same kind of project. If you look at the Federation of Small Businesses, I am sure they will have some pretty ghastly examples they can bring to your attention. Small businesses have a very important role to play in local economies, but they are only one interest group; sometimes you need to consult with small businesses and understand what their views are, take account of them but also consult with other people, consult with young people perhaps in relation to a particular project. What I do think is that compared to, say, 20 years ago, there are many more sophisticated mechanisms of consulting with different groups, whether it is focus groups, whether it is different sorts of planning for real exercises, whether it is citizens' juries or whatever, and I think the real issue is to use the right mechanism for the right group for the right purpose. Q57 Mr Cummings: Local Strategic Partnerships obviously bring together under one umbrella the local authority, business, the voluntary sector, community groups and the general public; to what degree do you see that Local Strategic Partnerships offer potential for the widening of consultation? Mr Cantle: There are a number of groups within Local Strategic Partnerships that almost become like a standing committee, whether that is business organisations or whether that is young people or voluntary sector organisations, and most Local Strategic Partnerships have behind them a whole series of groups which nominate people to the relevant section, so it does actually create quite an infrastructure of different groups from all the different sections which can form some consultative purpose, but that is probably still only just one way of consulting the local community or consulting with agencies in the local community. It is clear, I think, what we have been saying throughout our evidence, that there are lots of different ways of engaging with the community, and that is just another one of them, but it does not in any way undermine the other forms of consultation. Q58 Mr Clelland: We talked earlier about the question of the danger of consultation fatigue, but to what extent has the necessity for consultation been aggravated by the professionalisation of councillors and the vast reduction in their numbers which was brought about a long time ago by the 1972 Local Government Act, which halved the number of councillors. Would consultation be less necessary if we had more councillors and if there was a rule that they had to live in the ward that they represented and therefore be more in tune with what was going on? Mr Cantle: I am sure there is a view about that. Q59 Mr Clelland: Have you got one? Mr Cantle: I have, and I suppose it is a slightly personal view because I have been in local government for some time and certainly the councillors who I worked with 20 or 30 years ago I think had more established forms of consultation at their fingertips, it may have been through trade unions, it may have been through other associations in the local community, and a lot of that old social capital - if I can use that phrase - has broken down and no longer exists. Part of the consultation therefore is about inventing new ways of engaging with people, in recognition that some of the old ways have gone, and I am not sure that it is simply about the number of councillors. Q60 Chairman: One final question. In terms of training people to work in local government, does consultation play a sufficient part in that? Do you think most civil engineers know how to consult? Ms de Groot: I have to say that is a really good question, and I am not just saying that because you are the chair. Q61 Chairman: I was not asking whether it was a good question, I was asking for a quick answer. Ms de Groot: The answer is probably no, but increasingly I do not think you can rise to a senior position as a planner, engineer, environmental health officer or indeed housing officer unless you have some skills of communication, which is a backdrop to consultation, and an understanding of some of the basic mechanisms of consultation. I think it will increasingly become a requirement. Q62 Chairman: It may be a requirement, but is it in the training schemes that exist at the moment? Ms de Groot: In some but not enough, I would suggest. Chairman: On that note, may I thank you very much for your evidence. Memorandum submitted by Royal Town Planning Institute Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Mike Hayes, Past President and Ms Louise Waring, Planning Policy Officer, Royal Town Planning Institution, examined. Q63 Chairman: Can I welcome you to the Committee, to the second session on local government consultation and ask you to identify yourselves for the record, please? Mr Hayes: My name is Mike Hayes, I am the immediate past president of the Royal Town Planning Institute, and on my left is Louise Waring who is planning policy officer with the Institute. The Institute has around 16,000 members around the world, mainly in the UK, and approximately half of those members work in local government. Q64 Chairman: Thank you very much. Do you want to say anything more by way of introduction, or are you happy for us to go straight to questions? Mr Hayes: We are very happy to go straight to questions. Q65 Mr O'Brien: Your memorandum to the Committee draws a strong distinction between consultation and involvement; why is this distinction important and what forms of involvement would not encompass an element of consultation? Mr Hayes: It is very important that local authorities in particular are clear about the purpose of the exercise in which they are engaging with the public and the wider community. It might simply be the level of information, it might be direct consultation leading to a decision but we need to be working more generally to a process of more structured engagement over time. One of the issues that we address constantly is the planning hits people in quite a sudden way; suddenly someone wants to carry out something, or maybe you want to carry out a proposal, and I think that very often individuals and local communities have no wider context for dealing with the planning issues that they are being asked to address. They do not easily take on board the notion of change, they do not easily understand actually that managing change is fundamental to local government, and the more we can enable people to participate in the process of thinking about the business of managing change seems to me to be very important. To go back to my first point, it is critical that people understand the purpose of the exercise, the limits of the exercise and what will be done with the evidence at the end of the exercise. Q66 Mr O'Brien: The small business association in their evidence do not believe you, they say that they do not believe what the planners tell them or even what the developers say. How do you get over that? Mr Hayes: I am back in a sense to the theme I have just begun to open up. It does seem to me that we need at every level - nationally, regionally and locally - a more continuous discussion or debate about the nature of our towns and cities and our local communities. The Institute believes very firmly that that ought to begin in schools, it ought to be part of citizenship courses and it ought to open people up to the notion that, in a sense, the only certainty in life is that things are going to change. A fundamental issue for us all is how we manage that process. Q67 Mr Betts: You talk about the consultation at local level and say that this happens in the context of wider decisions that have been taken at national level, where the argument is that there really is not much consultation, there is a democratic deficit there. You then go on to say that that should be addressed by a UK spatial development framework. I cannot think of anything more likely to turn most people completely off than that sort of description. Mr Hayes: You may be right, but Wales has a national spatial development framework, Scotland has a spatial --- Q68 Chairman: Wales is only a relatively little place, is it not? Mr Hayes: It is. Scotland, another relatively small place, has a national spatial framework; Northern Ireland, another relatively small place, has one and indeed the Republic of Ireland, another small place has one too. I do not think anyone is suggesting that to carry out such an exercise for, let's say, in the first instance, England, is easy, but I think it is very clear - and some recent government policy initiatives are beginning to address the issue - that there is no forum for a debate about some of the key investment and development decisions that take place at national level: airport expansion; investment in rail infrastructure, in water supplies, in the location of new communities. I think you could argue that one of the reasons that some elements of the Sustainable Communities Plan have been received with criticism is that there was no context for that plan. It arrived, an announcement, which was portrayed as 200,000 more homes in London and the South East of England. Why? Where did that come from? Why did we not know about it? It does seem to me that initiatives like the Northern Way, three regions beginning to work together, are actually recognition of the need for some very broad strategic thinking. At the very least, while that sort of exercise might not lead to quicker or easier decisions, I think it would lead to more information, to better understanding, to this longer discussion about how we shape spatial innovation. Q69 Mr Betts: I am still not quite sure whether you are asking for elected people to be involved in that process or for something that engages the wider public. I think most members of the public switch off when presented with maps of regions and things outside their immediate vicinity which do not really excite them or interest them. Mr Hayes: You are obviously right: it is hard, except that on individual issues they clearly do get engaged. We have seen that recently over runways, for example. These things do excite people quite considerably. Q70 Chairman: How far do runways excite people? They want them, but most of them do not want them in their back garden, do they? Mr Hayes: Yes, but I am not sure - and I used to work there - if Glasgow was asked whether it wanted to expand its airport, or, if Manchester was asked if it wanted to have further expansion. I am not sure where that debate took place. I do think we need a great deal more work. The institute is working with Dutch partners to develop some technical tools to allow us to do regional analysis to try to predict the impact of investment decisions and to try to understand the interrelationship between regions. Getting back to Clive Betts' point just for a moment, if I may: you are clearly right: it is much harder to engage people at a broad level than it is at the local level, but one of our continuing problems/issues is that engaging people at the local level is often very painful, because people say, "Who made that decision?" "Who decided that this site would be a housing site?" or whatever. So I am pretty clear in my own mind that, maybe starting locally, and then working at the level of the local authority, and then maybe the level of the sub-region, and then the level of the region and then ultimately at perhaps a wider level, we need to engage people progressively in the business of making plans as well as the business of making decisions about individual development proposals. If there were more engaged at that level, that might assist with the process when it comes to making decisions about a specific development. Q71 Christine Russell: How do you envisage the measures in the recent Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act improving or influencing the situation? I am assuming that you think they will improve the consultation process, but do you think they will improve it? Mr Hayes: I think there is something quite heroic about the new Act. It is a very brave attempt to rebuild the planning system - we have not done that for half a century - and to reinvent it in a rather different way. The notion of - to use the jargon - "front-end loading" and the notion of "statements of community involvement" - the idea that you try to get the players together at the beginning of the process, to understand what the individual agendas are, to understand where people are coming from - seems to me to be wholly right. That, then, aligned to the notion of - and I think there is a huge test here on whether this can be delivered - a quicker plan-making process, a sense almost of a rolling plan, continually reviewed and updated, seems to me, in theory at least, to offer the possibility of people becoming more easily engaged, of being more aware of the issues and feeling that they have had their say at the right point of the process, at the beginning rather than at the end. One of the most disillusioned, almost sad group of people I have ever met in my local government career was a very, very active community in Waterloo in North Lambeth, who had tracked the process of developing the Lambeth Unitary Development Plan for all of its nine years of gestation and then discovered that planning decisions were being made that did not meet what they thought they had signed up to in the plan-making process, because the planners said, quite rightly, "Decisions are made on their merits." Q72 Mr Clelland: You said "they thought", who were they? Mr Hayes: This was a community group in Waterloo. Q73 Mr Clelland: Obviously it cannot be the whole community, but a group of active people. Mr Hayes: Yes, a group of local activists who had a particular agenda about protecting the local residential community but who had dedicated themselves in a very fine way to being engaged with the planners. Q74 Mr Clelland: How do you know how representative they were of the whole community? Mr Hayes: Actually, they had quite a lot of local community support amongst the residential community. But that was not the point I was making. The point I was making was that plan-making takes forever: it is bureaucratic; it loses the plot; policies change. So I am all in favour of trying to move towards a slightly more light-footed, faster, more informed, up-to-date process of planning. Q75 Christine Russell: Do you think the members of your institute are as enthusiastic as you obviously are personally about the new legislation? Mr Hayes: I have just spent an exhausting year trailing all around the UK and Southern Ireland talking to lots and lots of them in lots of ways, and, yes, they are. I think it would be foolish not to recognise that town planning has been through a very, very difficult couple of decades - sadly, most of my professional career. Marginalised, beaten up, told at one stage that the developers were the people who knew best and ---- Q76 Chairman: I do need rather shorter answers. Mr Hayes: Okay. So there is a moral issue, there is a resource issue, and there is a skill issue, but there is absolutely no doubt that our members are up for the new agenda. Q77 Sir Paul Beresford: The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act took the decision-making on housing matters away from county councils. Mr Hayes: Yes. Q78 Sir Paul Beresford: It has given them to regional assemblies. Mr Hayes: Yes. Q79 Sir Paul Beresford: In the South East there is a general feeling that the SERA has no contact with the local people. They do not know anything about it, it does not appear to fit in with their idea of regions, and there is considerable discontent. They are in the process of consulting on numbers, and, apart from my argument that they have asked the wrong questions, the typical reaction of the public is that they do not know who they are, they have never heard of them, they have got no interest in the consultation, and they would really like it with their local county council because they have an attachment to it. Would you agree with that? Mr Hayes: I would agree with your analysis of how people are reacting. If you are asking me to agree that we should return to county structure planning and the like, then I would not agree. This is very much a personal view - I need to make that clear - but it is also the institute's view, in truth. But I am aware that I work for a district council in the East of England region, so I am engaged with some of these issues with another hat on. It does seem to me that the county council boundaries are a bit of a problem. They are historic; they do not reflect the way the world works. It is also quite clear that regions are huge, particularly the South East of England and the East of England, and people do not easily identify with them. Q80 Sir Paul Beresford: These boundaries do not make any more sense than those of the county, if not less. Mr Hayes: They embrace wider economic areas and they embrace the notion of city regions, certainly in the North and the West Midlands. Q81 Sir Paul Beresford: I am thinking particularly of SERA. Mr Hayes: Sure. I think SERA is a particular problem - partly because of Kent and just its general shape. The point I want to make is that there has to be a response to strategic planning and investment decisions at the regional level. I suspect that further down the line that might involve looking at local government boundaries. I am very clear that in the short term it ought to involve district councils and county councils working at sub-regional level. Q82 Mr Cummings: How significant is the shortage in skills in public participation within local planning authorities? Can you advise the Committee what is being done to build capacity in skills? Mr Hayes: I think it is significant. The planning process has prided itself on being the first in the field of public consultation since the Skeffington Report in 1969, but that led us I think to a very formulaic and statutory form of consultation without much flexibility. I think other areas of public life, housing, for example, education perhaps - the whole business of regeneration - may well have developed better forms of consultation from which planners perhaps from time to time need to learn. I am very clear that we have some very fundamental problems here. One is that there are not enough planners to do the job nationally, and we are far too dependent in London and the South East on itinerant Australians, South Africans and New Zealanders. Q83 Sir Paul Beresford: They have come to save the world, have they? Mr Hayes: Absolutely. They do a wonderful job, but they tend to go home at Christmas, which is rather a problem. But I think the new Act is giving a huge incentive to develop the skills. In my own authority we have recently appointed a community engagement officer, who will sit within the planning service but will serve the whole council and all of its consultation needs and will be responsible for understanding: Who is this community? Who are the groups? Who are the hard-to-reach groups? What are the techniques we should be using? That good practice, I am sure, will grow. Q84 Mr Cummings: Are you saying that the local planning authorities do not have the resources and skills required to take the first step, the production of statements of community involvement? Mr Hayes: No, I think they are getting on with their statements of community involvement. They can do it. But we are clear that we need more resources. The resources currently are stretched. The task, I think for good reason, has become more complex. There is a sense in which we have to re-learn how to do the new planning - and I think that is a big opportunity. The Government has put very large resources into local government planning over the last two years. That is set to continue, and is very welcome, but, in a sense, that is a measure of what the resource gap is and we need to be looking to mainstream that. We also need to be looking to rationalise the way we consult and be more efficient and more effective about it. Q85 Mr Clelland: Given the shortage of resources, should not those community engagement officers very quickly look to using the resources of the elected councillors as a key part of the consultation process? Mr Hayes: Absolutely, and one hopes they do. Ms Waring: This is an area which a lot of our members have highlighted as an area of concern. Because of lack of resources and time and staff, they are concerned that, whilst they would want to produce incredibly good statements of community involvement, there is a little clause which says that only the minimum requirements must be satisfied, so there is a danger that it could just be falling back to the same practice as the previous system before the new Act came in. Q86 Mr O'Brien: We have a system today where planning authorities have to take into consideration the views of affected parties of planning applications, but they also have to determine applications in accordance with the local development plan, which can be six, seven, eight years out of date. Where the planning authority has to take into consideration the parties affected by the planning application when any decision is being taken and also the local development plan, there is a conflict there. How would you resolve it? Mr Hayes: It is often the case that planners making recommendations and, more importantly, committees make decisions are between a rock and a hard place. It is often the rock of the development proposal against the hard place of the development plan or perhaps of government policy which has changed since the development plan was put in place. The key is transparency: to be absolutely clear about the views of all the parties, to make sure we understand them and that they are properly recorded, and then for open and informed evaluation of the issues that leads to a technically good recommendation. That is not always easy, but at least if we have carried out our consultation processes correctly, if we have recorded what people have said and if we have been clear about the analysis that has led to the recommendation, people understand why recommendations are being made and why decisions are being made on the back of it and I think that is of enormous help. Q87 Mr O'Brien: Is there a danger that, because of this conflict, it could undermine the process of drawing up the development plans? First of all, on the number of participations taking place in the development plan and the way that it is consulted upon over a long period of time, do you consider that the number of participations will have an effect of weakness on the development plans that are now brought in? Should we have something new? Mr Hayes: We are going to have something new, and, you are right ----- Q88 Chairman: In ten years' time? Mr Hayes: We have it now. We have some quite tough targets in local government to meet. Core policies of your new local development framework need to be produced during this calendar year for government offices. Q89 Chairman: Yes, but how quickly are government offices going to do that? Mr Hayes: That is another issue and I think it is actually quite a serious issue. One of the reasons that the business of planning perhaps has become discredited and certainly misunderstood is that drawing up plans has taken so long. They have lost their way and people have lost their way in trying to work through the bureaucracy and the decision-making processes that go with that. We need to move to something that is more up-to-speed, which can be produced quickly. Critical to that, I think, is separating out strategic decisions from local decisions where change is going to take place. Q90 Mr Clelland: Do you think there is a significant risk of consultation fatigue? Mr Hayes: Absolutely. Q91 Mr Clelland: What should we do to avoid it? Mr Hayes: Corporately, local authorities need to be much more aware of how they are engaging local communities. That is about, very often, individual services talking to each other before they go out to the community - and maybe individual authorities as well, if it is a split, two-tier system. I do think we have an important opportunity in the alignment between community strategies owned by the local strategic partnership and local development frameworks owned by the local planning authority. Certainly, in my local authority, we are planning later this year that there will be one consultation and that will address the needs of the community strategy and the local development framework. I think being more efficient, actually telling people in advance what you are going to consult them over, having a programme of consultation, will help, but we also need - and I think lots of people in lots of places do this - to help community develop the capacity to respond to consultation too. Q92 Mr Betts: That almost sounds like we consult on one thing, and that is it, we go away and put our feet up for a few years and come back the next time. What we have been given in the 2004 Act is almost continuous consultation. Mr Hayes: I agree. Q93 Mr Betts: Do you think there is the capacity and the willingness out there amongst the public to respond to that? If not, what do local planning authorities do? Mr Hayes: There is clearly a willingness amongst the active and the already engaged and the special interest groups. Q94 Mr Betts: Who may not be very representative. Mr Hayes: Absolutely right. If I gave the impression that there is one consultation process, then we all go away and put our feet up, I apologise, because that is certainly not where I am coming from. I think we do need this continuing discussion and it is about how do you engage your community across the board on a continuing basis. I think some of those mechanisms are very often already in place. Most local authorities every three years conduct a poll, often conducted by MORI - it has become known as the MORI poll - of their community across a whole range of issues. Most local authorities now have citizens' panels that they use several times a year to consult over service issues or other issues. The planning service needs to get much more engaged with those systems that are already there. We do need to look at talking to children in schools; we need to look at notions like youth councils; we need to work hard at working with black and minority ethnic communities to ensure they are engaged as well. But the vehicles are often there. Local authorities are required to produce their annual performance plan and send it out to every household. Why can that not become a vehicle for consultation over your planning strategy as well? How we become more corporate, how we merge these exercises, I think is one of the keys to wider engagement. Q95 Mr Betts: Is there anything you can do in terms of providing basic education for the public, maybe community groups, about understanding the planning system? Often there is a lack of understanding about the basic legal position, as much as anything else. Mr Hayes: Absolutely. Our major initiative at the moment has been reconfiguring the planning aid service. The planning aid service has existed for over 30 years as a voluntary service, maybe 600 or 700 planners across England providing service to individuals and local communities who cannot afford professional advice. ODPM has recently grant-aided, over a three-year period, the ability to professionalise the management of that service, so we now have a national coordination office in Birmingham, there will be a website, there will be a set of tools, there will be teaching. We have professional management in each of England's regions, and we still have, and we are growing, that 600 or 700 volunteer base. That service I think is going to become a critical element in giving local people the tools to engage with the planning system. If I may mention one other initiative, we have also set up our Politicians in Planning Association where we are encouraging politicians at every level engaged with the planning service to network together and to tap into the resources of the wider organisation. Q96 Mr Cummings: Do you agree that the new council constitutions have made it easier for local people to be involved in local decision-making? Mr Hayes: That is interesting. Q97 Chairman: All our questions are interesting. Mr Hayes: Indeed. Q98 Chairman: We hope the answers are as well! Mr Hayes: Let me say, I do not think it has taken away from that ability at all. I guess I want to highlight three things very briefly. Most councils now operate area committees. They seem to me to be a very useful way of allowing local members to engage with local people about local issues. I think that is a valuable tool. The move to cabinet government, and to those few authorities who have directly elected mayors as well, I do think leads (i) to the ability to see things more corporately and (ii) to a more efficient planning process. It also allows - and I work for an authority with a directly elected mayor - for the mayor, who represents the whole town, the whole organisation, to pick up on issues that may be of particular community interest and run the consultation programme around it. The third issue I did want to pick up on is some concern that we have about the separation of executive and policy making in a cabinet, and planning decisions, that actually from time to time are implementing that executive policy, being made outwith that framework. I am not sure that is always helpful. Q99 Chris Mole: Is this not coming up to the point I made with the RDA, that you have parallel processes that are seen as "the council". Mr Hayes: Absolutely. Q100 Chris Mole: But you have an executive, which one might argue, rightly, should be proactive on regeneration, and regulatory arm that has to operate quasi-judicially. Mr Hayes: Absolutely. I think we need to look again at that. Clearly it is a difficult area. The quasi-judicial process needs to be independent and transparent, but it is operating within the context of an agreed strategy, so it needs sometimes to pay more attention to that strategy than it does. Q101 Mr Cummings: Do you believe that the new management structures within local government have tended to speed up decision-making? Mr Hayes: A one-word, simple answer is: yes, I think they have. Q102 Mr Cummings: Do you also agree that perhaps it makes more effective consultation on planning issues harder? Mr Hayes: I think there is a real tension between pressure to perform, by which local planning authorities are measured and financially rewarded - and performance is perceived, by and large, as speed - and quality of decision and quality of outcome. We have to work very, very hard to square that circle. I think one of the keys is consultant and community engagement on development proposals before they are formally submitted as a planning application. Certainly I have had some good direct experience of this working very, very well, and it leads to a more efficient process when that clock does finally start ticking and an application is submitted. Ms Waring: This is definitely an issue which our members are concerned about, the eight-week period for making a decision on applications. Obviously they are aware that there needs to be a lot more involvement with the community and they are finding some interesting issues and have had to reconcile the tension there. Q103 Christine Russell: Is it true that sometimes your members are reluctant to go out and engage with the community in development proposals because they have not been authorised to do so by elected members. Is that not a bit of an issue that some of your members actually face? Ms Waring: I am sorry, could I mention something in relation to the very first question about consultation and involvement and the point that you made a short while ago about whether the new system would improve involvement? Traditionally, the system has consulted on issues where the council will identify issues and ask people to comment on issues that they have created. I think the new system is trying, by frontloading, to get people involved in actually identifying the issues. That is where I would say, yes, the new system is making an improvement to the level of involvement. Mr Hayes: To return to Christine Russell's question, I think, in a sense, it depends which bit of the planning service we are talking about. Q104 Christine Russell: Development control officers. Mr Hayes: In development control I think it is very difficult for officers. Officers are serving the quasi-judicial function. They are in the business of transparency. They have duties both to the applicant, to the developer, and to the wider community. They have to serve both and they have to be seen to be serving both and sometimes that is very difficult. Historically officers have been used by developers as informally the promoter of the developer's scheme: they are the ones who have had to explain it. I think we have to move away from that. People forget that the new system imposes some considerable responsibility on developers, on the private sector too, to engage properly and to resource themselves adequately, to carry out consultation and to present their own proposals. Q105 Chairman: How easy do you think it is to gauge people's views as a result of consultation? There is a temptation for people to send back answers to questionnaires even though they do not feel particularly strongly about a particular issue, then for someone else to interpret it as a very firm decision on their part. Mr Hayes: I am not sure people easily fill in questionnaires on issues in which they are not terribly interested. Q106 Chairman: I will give you an example. I bought a new car three years ago. The only thing that is wrong with the car, as far as I am concerned, is that I continually get questionnaires from the manufacturer and from the servicer as to whether I am satisfied. I usually bin them, but sometimes, if I am bored, I send back fairly facetious remarks on them. I assume they take absolutely no notice, but I wonder whether they get around to changing the coffee in the coffee machine in the garage. Is there not a temptation for people to behave like that if they get a lot of consultations? Mr Hayes: Let's look at this in two ways. In terms of carrying out surveys through citizens' panels or MORI polls or whatever, we are now fairly sophisticated about who we have addressed the questionnaires to, our sampling techniques, our response levels, and I think it is statistically very often possible to reach a judgment about the value of an individual response - which is really the question you are asking. So I think on the statistical side I am fairly happy that people can make reasonable judgments about the evidence that is coming to them. I think planning very often does not lend itself to ticking boxes or to statistical analysis; it is about opinion, and very often it is about the weight of a petition, for example. The skill there is expressing that in a report, understanding it and evaluating it against policy, and that is not always a terribly streamlined or tick-box ----- Chairman: Would it not be far better to accept that councillors have an expertise and you should use the councillors' expertise in knowing their constituents, in the fairly firm belief on the councillors' part that if they do not look after their constituents they will not be councillors at the next election. Q107 Sir Paul Beresford: One of the problems with people that MORI cannot see is that, if they have been selected at random, if MORI had not asked the questions they probably, many of them, would not have been interested in answering them, and, if the questions had been put another way round, they would probably have given contradictory answers. I give you a very silly example. I remember a group setting up, in Putney High Street, a big petition, anti-fluoridation. So some active dentists set up a petition two yards down the road, ten houses down the road, pro-fluoridation. Most of the people who signed one petition, signed the other. Really what I am getting at, and what the Chairman was saying, is that many of the people who are asked actually do not have an opinion until they are forced to have one and they give an answer which actually does not carry the weight that the council will put on it. Mr Hayes: I beg to differ in the case of a citizens' panel. A citizens' panel is chosen to reflect the nature of the community, its diversity, its constituents, and people agree to be part of the panel. Q108 Sir Paul Beresford: But you are using MORI as an example. Mr Hayes: In the case of my local authority, MORI undertake the citizens' panel. They set it up and they handle the process for us. What is going on is a transaction from two willing partners. It is the council saying ----- Q109 Chairman: Yes, but then you have already skewed it, have you not? Because how do you get someone to go on a citizens' panel who is totally apathetic but when something happens is suddenly going to become pretty vociferous in their views? Mr Hayes: Yes, but the other side of your argument must be that it is completely unreasonable or unnecessary for local authorities to seek people's views, and I do not think --- Q110 Chairman: That is perhaps the role of the councillor. Mr Hayes: It is the role of the councillor to make decisions. I have rarely found a councillor who did not feel that it would help if that decision was informed by information, and part of that information is: "What do my constituents think about this?" and very often local councillors themselves will go out and find out what their constituents think - a good thing too. Chairman: Right. On that note, may I thank you very much for coming.
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