Nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIPs)

A platform that holds up under scrutiny

NSIP consultations get challenged often. A poorly documented or inaccessible process can delay or derail an application, and the stakes involved in major energy, transport and water infrastructure mean there is little margin for error. Citizen Space structures responses in a way that supports examination, keeps a clear audit trail of what was asked and what was received, and makes it straightforward to demonstrate that statutory requirements were met at every stage.

The platform is ISO 27001 certified, GDPR compliant, and meets WCAG 2.2 accessibility standards. For applicants managing sensitive data about land interests, affected communities and stakeholder positions, that baseline of security and compliance is not optional, and with Citizen Space it is covered from the moment you go live rather than something you need to arrange separately.

Supporting the move toward faster consenting

The government's planning reform agenda, including the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, is pushing for a shorter and more focused pre-application period for NSIPs, with the aim of cutting what has often been a two-year statutory pre-consultation period significantly. That puts a premium on consultation that is well-designed from the start, reaches the right people efficiently, and produces structured, usable evidence.

Citizen Space supports all of that. Built-in activity templates and workflows designed for statutory processes mean you are not starting from scratch, and a dedicated customer success manager with deep experience in government consultation can help you design an engagement approach that meets the quality standard the Planning Inspectorate expects.

Transparency throughout the process

Citizen Space gives you the tools to publish consultation summaries and responses directly on the platform, so communities can see how their input has been considered. The we asked, you said, we did feature closes the loop with respondents in a clear and auditable way, which matters for major infrastructure projects where public trust in the process is as important as the outcome.

For projects that will be living with local communities for decades, that transparency is not just good practice, it is part of building a relationship that lasts beyond the consenting process itself.

Reaching communities, not just statutory consultees

One of the persistent criticisms of pre-application NSIP consultation is that it tends to reach planning professionals and statutory bodies effectively but struggles to engage the local communities most directly affected. That gap matters both for the quality of the evidence you gather and for the legitimacy of the process itself. A consultation that demonstrably reached a broad and representative range of respondents is in a much stronger position at examination than one that generated detailed technical submissions but little meaningful community input.

Citizen Space is designed to work for all audiences without compromise. No login is required to respond, the platform is mobile-optimised, and question types can be adapted so that a local resident answering a few straightforward questions and a statutory consultee submitting a detailed technical representation are both working within the same structured system.

Conditional routing means different audiences see only the questions relevant to them, so the form never becomes unwieldy for people who only need to engage with part of it. Accessibility is built in rather than bolted on, with WCAG 2.2 compliance and screen reader compatibility tested as standard, which is particularly important for major infrastructure projects where the affected community may include people who would otherwise find it difficult to participate.

Managing the scale of a major infrastructure consultation

NSIP consultations can generate very large volumes of responses, particularly for projects that attract significant public interest or sit in areas where communities have strong feelings about infrastructure development. Citizen Space has been tested at scale on some of the highest-profile consultations run in the UK, and its analysis tools are built with that volume in mind.

Responses can be tagged, coded, filtered and cross-referenced within the platform, and the secure data API allows integration with external tools for deeper analysis, sentiment processing, or workflow management. First pass analysis, powered by AI, can help teams get an initial read on large volumes of qualitative responses quickly, identifying themes, sentiment and key issues while keeping human analysts firmly in control of all final judgements. One-click reports in PDF or Word format mean you can generate summaries at any stage of the process, and full data exports are available at any time in formats that feed directly into wider application documentation.

For large projects with multiple workstreams and teams working on different aspects of the consultation, Citizen Space's workspace architecture allows you to manage access and permissions carefully, so the right people can see and work with the right data without compromising security or creating confusion across teams.