E consultation - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

Pauline, The Planning Portal did have a national e-consultation hub for this purpose, but this fell victim to the cuts and therefore ceased to exist on the 1st January 2011. The Planning Portal may well be able to offer more information on the business case for working in this manner. From recollection, most statutory consultees had signed up the e-consultation service. Regards, Andy Byron.

At our last consultation, we only sent out hard copies of documents if this was specifically requested. We have email addresses for all our statutory consultees and the majority of the rest of our mailing list. As long as you make the offer of a hard copy if someone wants it, I can't see why there should be a problem with this method.

Hi, We were using the e-consultation hub before it was disolved and decided that we would continue to consult using email and links to our website. For the most part consultees have been quite receptive the only problems being our parish councils and a few civic societies. We just contacted everyone telling them what we were intending and that they should provide us with a contact email. We do about 90% of consultations by email link now and for the most part our consultees think its an improvement.

Chris, For statutory consultees, do you email the application as an attachment; send them a link to the applications page on your website; or email them a link to the specific application?

We still send out hard copies of documents to statutory consultees, which is inline with our Statement of Community Involvement (SCI). However everyone else gets a soft copy. However, this is likely to change when we review the SCI. I think if you go against your SCI you could have problems with being legally challenged by people in the future. So it may be worth reviewing this first, if you hadn't done it already, before you do away with the paper plans.