Over the past year, one of the recurring themes in the village has been about planning and development, and sometimes how difficult the planning system can be to engage with unless you already understand how it works. Consultation processes are often highly technical, deadlines can be short, and the language used in planning documents makes it hard for individuals to feel confident that their comments will carry weight.
We’ve now built a Planning Response Toolkit on the website.
The aim was not to tell people what to think about a planning application, but to make it easier for residents to take part in the process in a structured, informed and lawful way. The page brings together a set of simple tools designed to help people prepare formal responses, gather relevant evidence, and communicate with the planning authority in a format that reflects how decisions are actually made.
The idea behind the toolkit is straightforward, to provide guided forms that help residents produce clear, relevant and properly formatted responses without needing specialist knowledge of the planning system.
The current page brings together three main functions.
Rule 6 request generator
This was something I wanted to build because of my experience in the Richborough Inquiry. It prepares a formal request to become a Rule 6 party at a planning inquiry, it uses the correct wording and including the required reference details, this took me a while to read up on and do during the actual inquiry, so I made this one as a simple template for anyone else going through the system (anyone in England and Wales can use it for their own inquiry)
Objection generator
This guides people through the process of writing a planning objection based on material considerations, and produces text that can be submitted directly to the planning authority. I’ve focused on the arguments that carry weight in the planning terms. The tool allows you to generate the appropriate text in the context of whatever planning application you are referring too, and watch its been generated you can cut and paste into your own email, or letter, and send it.
Evidence and local knowledge collector
This allows residents to record observations, local history, traffic concerns, environmental issues, and other information that may be relevant to planning decisions or inquiries. This is a tool that helps us in the future, but we need to start using it now. On this page residents can report anything, accidents, crime, bad on street parking, anti-social behaviour, traffic problems, inability to get GP appointments, anything that you think we should know about that will help us shape the village in the future. It is important that you still report crimes, anti-social behaviour, etc to the police, or complain about things like power outages and sewage blockages and smells to the appropriate companies, but also recording it here gives us the opportunity to build a database of where and when things happen so we can challenge the planners, the councils, and if need be the police. So please start using the evidence collector – the more information the better.