In this instance, Brent Council faced losing tens of millions of pounds for new social housing if planning permission were not granted for a new building in January. In a tight economic climate, it is understandable that the Council made a foregone decision to grant the permission. What is neither understandable nor acceptable is that the Council pretended that an incomprehensible mailing to residents upheld its own ‘Duty to Involve’ policy, and that the planning meeting itself was an open and unbiased event.

Believing Committee members were genuinely open to facts my neighbours spent countless hours drafting model mock-ups of the proposed building, trawling through highly technical documents and crafting extensivly detailed arguments regarding the inadequacy of the proposal, only to find Committee members more interested in whether the windows of one house in one neighbourhood violated conservation codes than the overall impact of 150 unit dwelling. That legally mandated information was not available until just days before the meeting or that an arcane and inaccessible website kept crashing so much so that residents had to stay up until after midnight simply to down load key documents is another matter……

Having attended the Planning Meeting myself, I saw first hand the disillusionment that a ‘faux’ consultation exercise can have on citizens. Having dutifully trudged along to a so-called ‘site visit’ in the freezing cold – only to be presented with arcane architectural plans on a sub-zero street corner, my neighbours did not even realise that current technology would have made it relatively easy for the Council to post virtual mock-ups of the proposed building with easy to understand depictions of its noise and light impact on the neighbourhood on their website. While they may not be blaming the Council for a sub-standard use of ICT, they are certainly all disgusted by a sham ‘Duty to Consult’ that wasted their time, and made a mockery of the Council’s own policy.

This same Council is now hosting a community seminar next week on ‘Community Involvement.’ My neighbour passed what he referred to as ‘this joke’ along to me because he knew I would be interested in the subject. I am. But the ‘open’ seminar is a being held in community centre between 12-4 on a weekday. I would ask the Consultation Institute how ‘open’ – let alone representative – an event which excludes most of the working population really is? Surely, a Council that genuinely wants to hear from all its citizens would make some sort of attempt to leverage the Internet? Unless, of course, it is really not interested at all?

There is evidently a switch with some audiences to prefer online to more traditional approaches, but as with anything it is taking care to match methods to audience, not just jump at the latest whizzy thing.

The main problem with the new act is that it is yet another in succession, so the temptation will be to wait to see what the next act says, as by time the practice from the last one would be in place it would have changed, and who knows what the election will bring.

Quality, not quantity.