Consultation is not a communications exercise

The objections that stop projects are almost never the ones a comms plan is designed to answer.

We have taken thirty-one projects through statutory consultation. Four were refused, and three more were withdrawn before determination because we could see where they were going. In every one of those seven, the material objection was something a communications strategy would have classified as out of scope.

What we measured

We coded 2,900 consultation responses across those thirty-one projects into the category the objection actually belonged to, rather than the category the objector used to raise it. The distribution is not what the pre-application material assumes.

• Landscape and visual: 41% of responses, 1 of 7 determinative. The most raised objection is the one least likely to stop a project, because it is the one the system is built to weigh.
• Traffic during construction: 18% of responses, 3 of 7 determinative. Almost always about a specific junction or a specific school run, and almost always resolvable — but only if you find out early enough to change the route.
• Hydrology and private water supply: 6% of responses, 2 of 7 determinative. Rarely raised, extremely hard to answer late, and in both cases raised first by a single household.
• Process and trust: 22% of responses, 1 of 7 determinative. Not about the project at all. About the last one, or about the developer before us.

The pattern is that volume and impact are close to inversely related. A communications plan optimises for volume — it counts responses, it tracks sentiment, it aims to reduce the number of objections. Every one of those metrics would have told us the four refused projects were doing fine.

The objection that stops a project is usually raised once, by one household, about something specific, eighteen months before the decision.

What we do differently now

We separated two things that had been one job. Communications is still a job: people are entitled to know what is proposed, in language that is not designed to be skimmed past. Consultation is a different job, and its purpose is to find the objection that will be determinative while there is still time to design it out.

• We go to the private water supplies first. Before the public event, before the leaflet. In our two hydrology refusals the affected household found out about the project from a leaflet, and by the time we spoke to them directly the position had hardened for reasons that were entirely about how they had learned of it.
• We walk the construction route with the parish, not the traffic consultant. Three hours on foot has changed the route on five projects and has never once produced the same list the modelling produced.
• We ask what happened last time. On four sites the trust objection was specific, historical, and about a different company. It could be answered, but not by talking about our project.
• We publish what we changed. Every project now carries a public list of what was altered in response to consultation and what was not, with the reason. It is the single thing that has most reduced process objections, and it costs nothing.

What it does not fix

Some projects should not be built, and consultation done well is how you find that out. Of the three we withdrew, two were withdrawn because the consultation surfaced a constraint we could not design around and the honest answer was to stop. That is a successful consultation and a failed project, and treating those as the same outcome is how developers end up spending two more years on something that was finished at month nine.

It also does not fix a bad site. No amount of early engagement makes a scheme in the wrong place into a scheme in the right one, and the developers who most want consultation to be a communications exercise are usually the ones who need it to be.