In August last year, the Welsh government introduced new consultation requirements for developers submitting major planning applications. Applicants proposing schemes of more than ten homes or covering sites of 0.5 hectares or larger are now required to consult communities and stakeholders for at least four weeks before submitting their plans.
Under the old system, which is still used in England, the statutory requirement to consult applied only to councils and only took effect after an application’s submission.
One of the first large applications to go through the process was the Swansea Central regeneration project, which received outline permission in June. The 125,000 square metre scheme includes a 3,500-capacity indoor arena, a 13-storey hotel plus new shops, restaurants and cafés on the former St David’s shopping centre site in the city centre.
Property firm Rivington Land managed the development process on behalf of the applicant, City and County of Swansea. Planning consultants Savills did the formal consultation work required under the new rules, while Rivington led on the informal non-statutory elements of the process, including the public engagement.
Steve Bryson, Rivington’s public relations and communications manager, says: “Effectively, this requirement puts the onus of the statutory consultation work on the applicant, rather than the local authority, and it shifts it further forward in the timeframe.”
Nick Green, a director at Savills, says the formal consultation work was done in February and March this year. Under the new rules, applicants must notify neighbouring landowners in writing and make the draft application documents available for comment for at least 28 days before their submission.
Green says Savills prepared the draft planning application, which was published on the project’s dedicated website along with all the technical reports. This allowed people to review and comment on the plans during the month-long consultation period.
The firm also notified the statutory consultees and landowners in writing, invited comments from them on the draft plans and collated all the responses. “In this case, there were hundreds of neighbouring landowners,” says Green.
Bryson says Rivington, working closely with the council, led on the public engagement process, which he says is now standard for major schemes before application submission, though it is does not form part of the new Welsh statutory requirements.
The programme involved a series of events in the city centre to publicise the proposals. This included a “meet the consultants” day at Swansea’s National Waterfront Museum. Members of the public and local interest groups could meet and question the consultants who prepared the application. Bryson says it allowed people to have their technical questions answered and “helped minimise the actual objections”.
A further new requirement is that applicants must submit a pre-application consultation report to show that they have complied with the rules and taken account of relevant responses. Bryson says similar consultation reports are often submitted in support of major schemes anyway, with this requiring just “a few extra pages”. The plans received few objections, he adds, and the scheme itself, on a long-derelict site, had “a huge amount of support” from the public.
The main challenge, says Green, was timing. The application and associated documents had to be ready much earlier than they normally would be, in time for the formal month-long consultation ahead of submission. “You also need to allow a few weeks after the formal consultation, before submission, to give you time to take account of any comments made and make adjustments to the scheme.”
Green and Steve Smith, the council’s urban design team leader, say the new process added about six weeks to the programme timetable. But it “did ensure a swift determination of the planning application”, adds Smith.
Green says the new system creates a “smoother” and less risky process for applicants. “It allows technical consultees, like the Environment Agency, to make comments on the application at a very early stage. That allows the applicant’s technical team to address concerns early on. So when you submit the application, it should go through smoothly without any unpleasant surprises.”
This was also “an entirely new process for all concerned”, adds Bryson. “We were initially unsure of every step. For both us and Savills, it was a learning process, but when we got down to doing it, it wasn’t that difficult. If anything, it’s more engaging and innovative when the developer carries out the consultation compared to the local authority. We were keen to make it easy for people to understand what’s being proposed, by putting as much planning-speak into plain English as we could.”
Smith says the scheme was the largest application in the city to go through the process to date and the only one in support of an outline planning application. “It is an exemplar in our view,” he adds. “As a city undergoing significant regeneration, we welcome place-making dialogue and engagement at the earliest stages to meaningfully improve schemes.”
Article originally appeared on Planning Resource
