Local Plan Making - The 2012 Regulations and NPPF Paragraph 155 - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

Mike, the terms preferred options etc. has not been in the regs since the 2008 reforms. After that the form of pre-submission consultation was entirely down to the LPA provided it met legal requirements. The latest regs make some changes but that is still the broad position. The key test I think is ensuring you avoid any pre-submission JR on the Merrydown principal - see justice Lindbloms decision on Baingstoke &Deane Core Strategy published Monday. Unless you have consulted at pre-submission stage all reasonable alternatives, including the ones you dont like, and SEAd on them (to also meet the Forest Heath/Greater Norwich issues) you will risk a JR at the point of pre-submission consultation - so you need to work backwards from that point whatever you do to ensure that the 'early consultation' test is met from the EU SEA consultation directive. The key is to consult on options when they are 'hard' options - that you know the main environmental impacts, i.e. traffic, water cycle, landscape sensitivity etc. rather than being forced to do endless rounds of consultation when these reports come through. I think the need for early highly conceptual consultation on ill defined and incomplete options fulfils no legal purpose and should be dispensed with. Perhaps a 'major choices' consultation, with options and where relevant (not on every policy) alternative policy wordings - then followed by submission. Of course a draft submission plan can be published informally on the web at any time to gather comments, and the extent that is followed up by on the ground active engagement will be a matter of local choice. With 20-30% cuts in many LPAS its looks increasingly that extremely labour intensive on the ground consultation will be left to neighbourhoods acting as intermediaries not planning officers.

Andrew, whilst your final paragraph suggestion is along the lines we have been thinking of and indeed hoping we could pursue, we are not sure that it qualifies as being early enough in the preparation process. Our legal advice is that we could satisfy this element of the Regs by issuing and promoting a short pamphlet type document outining the why, what, when etc points and using it to seek representations on what the plan ought to contain. We might be able to manage some proactive community engagement too if we do it soon enough.

Mike - in European cases providing there has been consultation on options it has been considered sufficient to meet the early test from the directive, ill try and dig out the caselaw.

We have also been looking at this in terms of revising our Core Strategy. Given that we consulted widely on the inital issues and options (and all subsequent stages) in originally preparing the plan, and we will be making minor changes to a recently adopted document (October 2010), is it reasonable to assume we can skip to 'publication' stage of our revised Core Strategy or would this fail to satisfy Reg 18?

Has anyone given any thought to Sustainability Appraisal and how this fits in? If we produce an early scoping report for consultation, this doesn't seem to me to be able to be appraised as it wouldn't contain enough information (plus there is no mention of SA in Reg 18). So the first SA document for consultation would be at Pre Submission (Reg 19) Stage. Is this right?

Helen the main message of this thread is that alternative options need to be appraised and that is one good reason why a preferred options stage document should be produced ie so the SA, with its SEA component, can be properly done. I agree Reg 18 is confusing in this respect.

In 2011 we carried out an (old) Reg 25 Public Participation exercise on our DM DPD. After this work was 'paused' to await the NPPF. We are now considering if we can move directly to the (new) Reg 19 and 20 stage, or given that the NPPF is in place and new Regs in force whether we should re-run the earlier public participation (under new Reg 18). My inclination is to 're-run' the earlier stage but include with it a non-statutory preferred options consultation (making it clear we are open to new suggestions under Reg18). Is anyone in a similar position and come to a view?

There's an endless logical loop in this which runs as follows; 1) For consultation to be credible, participants need to be able to suggest alternatives not previously considered and the confidence that where alternative suggestions are well-founded they will be acted upon; 2) Alternatives cannot be incorporated into the plan without consultation and SA/SEA 3) Carry out consultation and SA/SEA into alternatives 4) Return to step one 5) Repeat until taken into psychiatric care babbling incoherently about speeding up the planning system. The academic answer is that the LPA should have considered and SEA/SAd all possible options at the outset. Unfortunately if you have 500 potential sites and 10 potential policy designations this yields around twenty five million possible permutations all of which change every time a new site is added or a site is amended and this is before you've even started thinking about development requirements.