Decision details

Mr Hyland presented his report informing the committee of the differing styles of consultation e.g. consultation carried out on a planning policy document in contrast to consultation on use of a local park.

The council uses a range of consultation tools. There were two software systems in use: Snap Survey is used for the majority of consultations. Responses are automatically drawn into the back office system for analysis therefore further data entry is not required. The Limehouse system is used to carry out consultation on planning policies which require that the wording of the policy is displayed paragraph by paragraph for comment.

The Southern Gateway Masterplan consultation had necessitated a consultation on the Masterplan document itself, and Limehouse was used to allow for detailed commentary on the wording of the document.  It was also recognised that residents directly affected by developments in their areas would welcome a briefer summary of the main issues and to comment on those, so a Snap survey was also used.  Clear signposting from one to the other was placed on the website. A very good response rate had been received to both forms of consultation.

There was concern that the Limehouse consultation tool was not particularly user friendly. There was a facility to provide a hard copy of the consultation for completion however this was not encouraged as a) it would require to be entered manually onto the system and b) interpretation could be required in preparing the information for entry.

The committee made the following comments and received answers to questions as follows:

·         Concern that the process should be user friendly to ensure a better response and increased user satisfaction.

·         Concern about the level of response to consultations – It was difficult to define a ‘good’ response to a consultation. From a statistical point of view it was possible to determine a level of accuracy with 100 responses. A 10% response rate would be good in other situations. If the issue involved a large body of people and a complex issue that level of response would be very difficult to secure.

·         The issue of double consultation – Where the council, interest groups, residents’ associations or other such body consults their members for a combined response on behalf of that group and consultation which is carried out with the district’s residents and parishes directly.

·         Concern at the lack of a consultation policy - As there was a breadth of types of consultation it would be difficult to have a single policy to cover all those scenarios and the guidance available was considered adequate.

·         Concern at the lack of resources available to carry out this work - There was currently one full time and one part time officer dedicated to consultation work, however this was under review. Devising the methodology of the consultation and the analysis of the results once the fieldwork was complete was often very resource intensive and regularly involved staff from the service areas. The Chichester Vision consultation was resourced by five or six staff members at manned presentation events.

·         Queried who made the decision about whether one consultation was resourced more intensively than another.

·         Queried whether neighbourhood plan consultations should be carried out by the council.

·         Queried whether there was a comparator to establish how well our consultation process was carried out benchmarked against other local authorities.

·         Concern at the lack of clear instruction on the Local Plan consultation regarding character limits, how to upload documents, time limits before timeout, etc. Suggested that a note is included at the beginning of a consultation describing how long the form would take to complete.

·         Queried the requirement for demographic questions.

·         Queried response rates and what constituted a ‘good’ response. The Southern Gateway response was considered ‘good’ with 350 responses to the online questions, 327 detailed comments and 60 responses on Limehouse. This consultation had received very good coverage in the local press. 

·         Suggested that the list of those completing a response at the end of the consultation analysis be listed in alphabetical order.

Members suggested that a group of officers could be used to test and validate the consultation process on Limehouse before it is released to the public and that additional guidance should be added on how to use the system.

RESOLVED

That a Task and Finish Group be established to consider  a council policy on public consultation and make recommendations as appropriate for  resources,  budget and monitoring.