Site Notice or Neighbour Letter - Postal Charges increase. - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

On the smaller schemes it may be more cost effective to hand deliver letters to the neighbours when doing the site visit. I remember doing that in the 90's when I worked in Devon - it takes a little more time to do the visit but, then again, you take more notice of the surroundings and the relationship of the proposal to the neighbours. In fact, it often meant that I met the neighbours and (because I'd have the file with me) I could quickly address their questions - I'm pretty sure I headed off many objection letters because of that. Anecdotal methods aside, and bearing in mind that people increasingly seem to want a neighbour letter even though they're not a near neighbour, I'll throw the following into the ring: 1. is this a good reason to push on with LPA's getting to set their own fees to more effectively cover these costs, or otherwise changing the regs to get applicants to meet the exact cost of publicity, given that it isn't necessarily directly related to scheme size? 2. fully explore what the web has to offer (email, twitter, facebook, etc), whilst recognising that not everyone uses or has access to the web (eg. get households to opt in to e-publicity and thereby opt themselves out of a neighbour letter - not an instant solution, but effective. A final thought, for those doubtful about the suitability or power of the web: application publicity is about community engagement and for a majority of the community getting a piece of paper in the post is just too 20th century. We're in transition from a paper world to an electronic one, so whatever the solution to the rising cost of posting a letter it won't be THE answer to publicity.

We average just under 100,000 neighbour notification letters a year, so its already a significant cost to the service, plus when you add in the costs of the site notices (2000+ per year) and adverts (1000+) in the local paper, the costs of publicising planning applications are not insignificant. In addition, we do use the web quite extensively and have the usual online searching for applications and email alerts etc (but not yet got round to offering text alerts or QR codes on notices/letters). The other factor is of course ‘word of mouth’ which I suspect plays a big role in alerting residents to planning applications. Out of all this. last year we got 6600 comments in total and 82% of them came electronically My thinking is that the whole publicity/notification of planning applications process needs to be reassessed to reflect (as Andrew says) the fact that there is a very IT/internet savvy and Smart Phone owning population out there, who are unlikely to be reading formal notices in local papers and who would not be motivated to get involved by receiving a brown envelope from their council. But in the meantime, my feeling is that stopping individual letters might have the impact of reducing how widely we engage with people in the planning application process, and would see the number of comments we receive drop. Whilst it could be argued that receiving less comments/involvement is a plus in 'business' terms, I don’t feel that this is where we should be going. So, for the moment I see individual letters as still playing a role in making people aware of planning applications, and feel that planning department budgets need to be increased to reflect the new postal charges.

The council here recently changed our second class posting to UK mail. This is certainly cheaper than Royal Mail and will be much cheaper after the increases. If someone writes in regarding an application, do you send a letter to notify them of the decision? If someone has left an email address, then we send them an email.

Just a word of caution... Check wahat your statement of community involvement says, and remember that you will need to do Equalities Impact Assessment before you change something like this. Also don't forget how expensive it is to deal with complaint letters and ombudsman... Regardless of what the law says, your sci says, neighbours WILL expect a letter... Be careful dudes.

We to don't use RM for second class letters either. Re letting people know of the decision, the default is email, and we only use paper if there is no email address. Have checked our SCI, and it is silent on how we let people know about applications. Good points about the EIA and costs of complaints, but is the 'must have a letter' expectation starting to fade away?

As a matter of interest, do local councils notify neighbours on proposed certificate of lawfulness?

We have always relied on site notices which is the minimum requirement in the legislation. We've had the odd umbudsman complaint where we haven't posted one in the street behind but the officers will generally know when to do this, but we've certainly not had one in the last couple of years. We don't post notices for certificates of proposed lawful development as this is not generally a matter where the public can have much of an input. Clearly if the proposed development were major and could have a significant impact on the community, we would consider on a case by case basis whether we should advertise. we do send letters of notification when we receive objections and then let people know the decision and/or when an application is going to committee. We are however looking at stopping this and ask people to self serve a bit more! The less said about our SCI the better Phil!

I thought the Government recently reviewed public consultation and decided that newspaper notices should remain ! Site notices are generally the minimum requirement but in publicity terms I have doubts about their value. How many public letters have you received which mention having seen a site notice compared to those which mention having received a letter ? Also I don't think the RM business rates were or are the same as for the general public

I know that a group of authorities in the North East are using a PAS supplied consultant for projects that include looking at harmonising their approach to consultations with a view to improving the value for money. I wonder if any of this group would like to let us know how they are getting on with this project.

this was an issue that cropped up when I last worked for a local authority in relation to benchmarking and setting of fees and the cost of consultations The concern was that the cost any consultation beyond the limited amount required by legislation would arguably be difficult to recover. However, as the council had a SCI which obliged the dep’t to carry out a high level of public consultation. The solution put forward was they cant have here cake and eat it , we would reduce consultation levels to the statutory requirements and amend the SCI to address this to avoid losing any complaints to the ombudsman. My experience is the ombudsman has an issue if there is a failure to comply with the stated consultation policy not what the consultation policy is.

There have been a number of threads through the forum with many Local Authorities looking at ways to reduce neighbour consultation costs for planning applications. We have been doing some trialling of posting neighbour letters when the site assessment is made - this has resulted in mixed feedback from both Officers and neighbours. We are interested to see if any Authorities have changed procedures so that only initial letters are sent and no further contact for any amendments or to inform of the decision is provided. If anyone has considered this please share your experience.