UK Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) 
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Challenge
The London Borough of Wandsworth’s Night Time Strategy (NTS) project aims to make the night-time in Wandsworth safer and more inclusive for people in the area, as well as help the high streets thrive at night. A first-of-its-kind document, the project team undertook various forms of engagement – a lengthy process with information gathered on different platforms. Their approach included extensive consultations ranging from one-to-one meetings with stakeholders to engagements with over 1,000 contributions online. The different systems holding the feedback were hard to align and labour intensive to summarise. Producing consultation reports could take weeks of a planning officer’s time, delaying project timelines and weakening trust between the borough and residents.
Approach
PropTech Innovation funding of £45,000 was provided for a pilot with Commonplace, developers of a leading citizen engagement platform. They worked together to consolidate all the various forms of engagement for the NTS into a single, online consultation report using the same platform the consultations were held on. Commonplace’s existing dashboard was used to create customisable, interactive consultation reports with embeddable charts and the ability to import data from previous consultations.
Results
The iterative development process led to summarised feedback charts from multiple engagements being released to the public quickly as part of a consultation report. The interactive consultation reports streamlined the process by having the same design as the rest of the consultation and appearing in the same place, as part of the Commonplace webpage. This made the journey much clearer from consultation stage to consultation report, and to the presentation of the final report.
The pilot led to significant cost and time savings for planning officers compared to averages before the trial, as well as an increase in the level of citizen engagement.
Production time for each consultation report was reduced by approximately 98%, from 4 months (around 120 days) to 3 days.
Turnaround time for report production increased substantially, as reports no longer needed to be sent to a design team. The cost of producing a consultation report decreased by 80%, from around £3,000 to £600.
Next steps
Planning officers will continue to use this tool when producing consultation reports and there are plans to roll out this successful approach to other councils too. The interactive report function is already being used elsewhere such as in the City of London’s waste plan.