Alic, The PAS document you mention contains alot of good basic but fairly broad brush advice. On Core strategies there are twoor three passing references to Core strategies and in Section 3.8 just 4 paragraphs - which for the most part are okay at identifying the difficulties associated with Core Strategy consultation but dont really provide much practical help. From my own experience a Core Strategy is at far too high a level for most peope (and I include professional stakeholders, developers as well as residents etc) to relate to. I found myself on one occasion trying to expalin a "key diagram" type plan to some councillors and local residents at a meeting to launch our Preferred Options consultation and I was told that the diagram was discriminatory because it was not possible to tell whether any particular address was affected and that someone withlearning difficulties would not be able to understand it. This aside as the Core Strategy is the most important DPD we all have to produce I think the PAS should focus more attention on it than it has. What planners at the Coal face need to have is an array of "sound" examples of how startegic issues can be succesfully investigated and options developed and tested through consultation. in ways that all lvevels in the community can find useful without having to drag it down to "how is my street affected?" I would also like to take issue with the advice about using Non-technical summaries. We wanted to do this with our Core Strategy PO consultation recently because of the size of the thing. Our friendly GO however warned us it could be unsound to do so, becuase no matter how much we warned the reader of any summary document that they should look at the full report before telling us their views, they would probably not do so and so would not be in possession of the full picture. Thus our relienace on their views would be unsound. There is a very serious question here. Whose advice should we rely on?
