Community engagement in planning: towards a code of conduct

By Matthew Morgan, Director

Since 2021 we’ve been working with four universities across the UK — Reading, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Ulster — to deep dive into the world of community engagement on issues of place. We’ve been doing this through the UKRI-funded Community Consultation for Quality of Life project.

The project has gathered a huge amount of evidence about what does and doesn’t work in community engagement (reports to come this year), as well as some really interesting insights into how people feel about engagement.

Spoiler: the majority of people we’ve spoken to through this project did not recall ever having been asked to contribute to a consultation or engagement before.

This brings a number of questions to mind:

  • What can be done to make them more inclusive and enable more people to have a voice?
  • And, crucially, what is the built environment industry getting right and wrong?

Inconsistency in quality is a problem

Of course, there are some excellent examples of inclusive and impactful community engagement. For example, URBED’s programme of engagement in Old Trafford, Manchester, or the programme on the King’s Estate in Hackney, London.

The problem is though that this is not consistently the case.

The quality of built environment engagement programmes differs vastly from project to project, with some examples of best practice and some that are just not meeting the needs of local people.

A code of conduct

So, through Community Consultation for Quality of Life, we’re working with a group of experts in the field of community engagement to develop a code of conduct for community engagement in planning.

This code will provide practitioners with a minimum standard from which to build their programmes, as well as providing advice on how to take those programmes from good to great.

The code is in development at the moment, with a plan to launch it in the autumn. We want to make sure it’s as useful as it can be to people working on the ground, and to the communities impacted by engagement. So if you’re interested in sharing your views on what it should include, please drop us a line: mail@qolf.org

The Community Consultation for Quality of Life project produced a toolkit for inclusive engagement in 2022, full of useful advice on ensuring your consultations are as inclusive as possible.