How Defra's foundational LNRS consultation set the template for 48 authorities across England
The challenge
In 2021 the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) needed to establish new Local Nature Recovery Strategies across the whole of England, following new statutory requirements in the 2021 Environment Act.
Before any of the local authorities could begin that work, however, Defra needed to establish exactly how they should collaborate with stakeholders such as landowners, environmental groups and the community at large on the new LNRS’.
These weren't simple questions with obvious answers, and getting them wrong risked either creating a rigid national process ill-suited to England's enormously varied landscapes, or leaving so much local discretion that strategies would be impossible to compare or collate nationally.
Defra needed a consultation capable of gathering detailed, structured input from an unusually broad range of respondents on detailed questions spanning six distinct policy areas; and then turn that input into workable statutory guidance and regulations that would stand up to scrutiny at national scale.
The approach
Defra ran its consultation on Citizen Space, gaining opinions and responses on all 6 parts of the soon-to-be-formed LNRS’.
Respondents worked through a detailed set of multiple-choice and open-ended questions, allowing Defra to gather both quantifiable, comparable data (which organisations should be considered essential stakeholders, what proportion of a strategy area should be mapped as a priority) and rich written testimony from organisations with direct experience of the five LNRS pilots that had informed the policy's early design.
This was supported by an offline programme of stakeholder workshops and meetings, for far-reaching engagement.
The result
The consultation drew 389 responses through the activity itself, with a further 76 received by email, reaching a genuinely wide cross-section of interested parties.
That breadth of response gave Defra a strong evidence base on almost every element of the eventual policy and shaped their requirement for locally tailored engagement in the consultation stage of each local authorities LNRS.
Having established the shared framework for collaboration, consistency and mapping through this single Citizen Space consultation, Defra gave all 48 responsible authorities a common, tested approach to follow for their own local strategies and statutory public consultations.
Many of those authorities went on to run their own LNRS consultations on Citizen Space, building directly on the foundations this consultation put in place.
Delib is a govtech leader specialising in consultation and engagement, trusted by over 600 government organisations worldwide, including major planning projects. Since 2004, we've been building secure, accessible digital platforms to make participation simpler, fairer, and more inclusive. Our flagship product, Citizen Space, was built in collaboration with the UK government and has supported more than 11 million responses across over 110,000 democratic activities.