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ALL local planning authorities are required to notify the public either through a site notice. You’ve probably seen your fair share taped to lamp posts and fading on notice boards. These are an extremely important (and legal) requirement for any kind of development, but ones we see these days can often find themselves lacking. Considering British weather and the attention span of the average commuter, physical site notices NEED to be, at the very least), attention-grabbing, weatherproof and have a clear call to action for those passing by. A piece of paper and sellotape simply will not do! Luckily there’s a solution. On top of making sure physical planning notices are sturdy enough to survive the wind and rain, also utilising digital planning notices can really help increase public engagement.

With this a crucial step in any planning process, we’re going to cover the best ways to create planning notices and how to get them seen by as many people as possible. After all, the goal of any engagement is getting the local community to see/comment on your proposal and the current system is a tad antiquated if we do say so ourselves.

Fighting low engagement in planning

Current engagement with planning is already low, so getting people interested in upcoming developments can feel like an uphill battle at times. Only 27% of our own survey sample had taken part in a planning decision. Not only that, but of those who had engaged, twice as many had signed a petition to oppose a development compared to those who’d actually attended any sort of planning meeting. *

An online planning notice provides a user-friendly way for people to find out about all proposals near them in an easy to understand format. Having the ability to click from a desktop or leave a comment on a proposal from their phone makes engaging that much easier.

“What are planning notices?” Helping people understand

Printed site notices are great for catching the public’s eye as they walk past, but often don’t have the space for every single detail. Text heavy documents can turn off readers and having multiple pages of explanation make it hard to stick up in a convenient way.

This doesn’t help when many people don’t know what it means to actually ‘get involved’ in planning. Does it mean taking part in and organising meetings? Contacting planners directly? Leading public opinion? In our research, many people were scared to participate as they thought they’d have to take charge and they didn’t want to risk appearing ‘ill-informed’.

Our research, in partnership with Innovate UK & DLUHC confirmed that most residents often ask “what are planning notices?”

• They don’t understand why they appear and disappear
• They don’t understand the words or the pictures or there’s too much jargon
• They feel self-conscious stopping in the street to read it
• They think contributing is only for people who oppose the project
• They don’t believe their opinion would actually change anything

To tackle this, people not only have to have access to information, but they need to properly understand it as well. This is where the ‘digital first’ approach comes back into play for planning notices. Having a platform where all information, as well as what’s required of the public, is clearly presented is key. This doesn’t just mean having a website, as a digital strategy should also include following up with emails, sending out regular social media posts and finding out exactly where the community usually turns for local news and updates. Your physical planning notices could have a handy QR code printed on so people can scan with their phone and be directed to all the information they need without it taking up too much page space.

Creating relevant planning notices

Planning notices receive more engagement w h en they’re targeted to those they are most relevant to. A sign on a public noticeboard might be passed by hundreds of people each day, but ho w many of them w ill actually be affected by this project?

With Commonplace, the local community can comment on planning applications as well as sign up for alerts about other projects in their area or that they feel are relevant to them. These are sent directly to their email so they can easily view planning applications online and help encourage a longer lasting relationship between citizen and planner- giving them the power to make a difference to projects and developments that directly interest them.

How to view planning applications online? Watford Borough Council’s engagement

One of just 13 local authorities to win up to £100,000 from the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ (DLUHC) PropTech Engagement Fund, Watford has focused its grant on vastly improving the way they use digital tools to consult the public on planning applications and planning notices.

With this new website, Watford residents can easily see and comment on the purpose and design of major planning applications that have been submitted to Watford Borough Council. Their interactive map highlights each area with a proposed development which residents can click on and then see a full summary. It’s then easy to leave a comment or subscribe for updates on that particular planning application as it develops. Each proposal also has a clear timeline showing each phase of the consultation and development so the community can stay up to date with each. Key data for each proposal is also succinct and easily digestible making it easy to understand for all their citizens.

This project also utilises 3D mockups and images so viewers can better understand the area and easily visualise the completed projects.

One of the main goals of this website was to help build trust between planners and the local community. This is why all details about each development is clearly laid out and every comment left is visible to the public. This helps dispel the notion that planning decisions happen behind closed doors or that their own friends and neighbours aren’t getting involved.

Find out more about it with our press release.

To find out more about digitising your planning notices, our team will be more than happy to show you how. Just book a personalised consultation below and we’ll be with you ASAP.

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* Engaging for the future report. 1000 people surveyed.

Originally published at https://www.commonplace.is.

Or you can watch the whole thing for yourself. Access the free recording here.

It’s never been more important for tenants in social housing to have a direct line of communication with their landlords. With the confinement of the pandemic showing just how much a home and local areas can affect someone’s well being, the ability to have clear and transparent conversation about their estates and neighbourhoods is crucial.

Only by listening and understanding tenants’ lived experiences can real progress be made, with online engagement playing a huge factor in this- now more than ever. By gathering as many views of the community as possible, social housing providers can vastly improve any upcoming design strategies, construction, post-occupancy evaluations and community projects. On 10th March, we were joined by an expert panel to discuss this:

If you missed out, we’re here with a quick rundown of our panellists’ talking points as well as access to the free recording which you can watch at your leisure.

Jessica Stewart- Comm Comm UK: What do people want from their homes?

I think community engagement has never been more important or more well respected by, not only the development industry, but everyone across the board. We’ve had a horrible two years and it’s taking a while for everyone to get back to normal and to function with confidence. I think communication is going to be important for getting everyone, especially the tenants in our housing association homes, back to living their lives happily.

So when thinking about the topic of what the housing industry was like pre and post covid, it’s important to remember that it’s a very broad topic. I’m reading a book by Willian Bridges at the moment about transition and how it’s a three phase process: there has to be an ending, a neutral phase and a new beginning. I think societally we’re probably in the neutral phase at the moment. This is where you can be really creative and come up with new ideas. We can hopefully come up with some really great ideas for communicating with tenants as we come out of covid properly and start to live our lives again.

I think the first thing to consider is what the housing industry actually is. Is it the houses themselves and the people who design them? Is it the management of those homes? Is it the companies and associations that run them? Is it people like me who spend most of our days in village halls or on webinars like this?

Well I think it’s everybody as housing is all to do with people. We all live in a home and during covid I think we’ve all had to accept new truths. Digitisation has been massive. I look at my parents and in-laws and they’re more than happy to use zoom at the age of 80. This has had a bigger impact on consultation. We are seeing more people than ever engaging. Before, we might have gotten fifty people to a public exhibition and now we’re seeing a huge number of people from all sorts of demographics engaging.

I think a lot of this comes back to changing aspirations of what people want in their homes. People want freedom- they want outside spaces and freedom to choose how to use their internal spaces. They are choosing to become part of communities now more than ever. They also want safety and security to protect themselves and their families, they want to live in healthy homes and the important thing is to build trust with those tenants through continuity and commitment from housing associations.

James Williams HACT: Using social value frameworks effectively

What’s really interesting about the world as we come out of covid is how engagement and communication has changed. Obviously we’ve had a big kick-start in the working environment with how we’re communicating more online than we used to. I reflect back on the work I used to do with a housing association and how we did community engagement then. I have to say it was fantastic with a lot of face to face work which made you feel as if you were immersed in the community. Meetings, door-knocking and events were all useful tools for engaging with people but I think that technology and social media brings huge opportunities to engage in a different way. There will always be a roll for face to face engagement (as there should be!) but all sorts of organisations are coming up with ways to talk to people that we just hadn’t thought of before.

Seeing some of the work that Commonplace and EcoWorld are doing is really exciting. In terms of HACT (Housing Association Charitable Trust) as an organisation, we have a strong connection to the social housing world and we’ve always been really interested in how you can perceive social change. We have the social value bank which asks a whole range of different questions about how people are feeling and how things change over time. That’s really powerful and I’ve always liked it as it’s asking you to check how people are affected by what you did. Instead of just acknowledging that you’ve held a session with so many people, it asks you to consider what happened because of that session. I vividly remember meetings with community members and the police where the police were saying “we’ve got no record of crime here” and the community answering that there was indeed a problem with crime and that they were worried about it. The social value bank can help with those kinds of situations by understanding feelings better. Of course you can just look at statistics about crime rates but really it’s about if people are feeling safe.

There are a whole range of questions you can ask people, like if they feel like they belong in the community. The social value bank gives you pre and post surveys so you can check with people when things are changing. You can break it down into different sectors and backgrounds too to see what kind of impact you’re making across the entire community. There’s a real opportunity to look at social equity and accessibility.

The work HACT does is evolving all the time. It relies on people out there to test it and use it and feed it back. At its heart, the concept of social value measurement is linked very closely to engagement and communication. The best way to gain trust is to check how they’re feeling about things and to open up and dialogue to check in. That gives you insight that’s really valuable to help you progress in the future.

Commonplace is really at the forefront of this kind of technology and it’s exciting times for our industries!

Nivene Powell- EcoWorld London: Social value and community engagement. Two sides of the same coin

If we’re going to think about the importance of community engagement to social value, we have to remember that you can’t have one without the other. Social value is tailored to the needs of communities. You can have different themes depending on the different demographics of that community. It builds dialogue, so for me, community engagement is integral to anything that we do as service providers.

My background is in the public sector so I can bring all those skills to community engagement and demonstrate how valuable it is to what developers do. It imbeds proactive methods within the way that we work. So for planning, community engagement is core to the planning process. We need to find out what the community wants and needs and how we can get them involved in our place making and design of outside space. It builds relationships with communities and individuals and for me, that’s very very important.

I work very closely with housing associations as well so I build that dialogue to see how we can pool resources in retards to community activities and community projects. It’s about effectively engaging all partners involved with a development to effectively fulfil any social value framework. Community engagement isn’t isolated. It also touches on aspects like diversity and inclusion. Engaging and building up that relationship and having basic conversations with communities that we as service providers find it difficult to engage with is essential.

Community engagement helps to address and connect those who are socially isolated as well. We have a number of the population that find it difficult to physically engage and network so having an online tool is something that can break those barriers. It also helps to leave a legacy.

Social value is not a tick box exercise as it encompasses a number of themes that we know we have to deliver and make a difference on. From a selfish point of view as well, it helps better your reputation when you demonstrate that you are having meaningful dialogue and showing the actions that you’ve taken. Social value is the action arm to community engagement. It’s key to how housing associations tailor their services and it’s important to speak to people so they can have influence on decision making. We provide services to residents to meet their needs rather than telling them what they’re going to have.

We build trust by creating a rapport with community engagement. It runs through every element of what we do.

That was the rundown of our webinar panellists! As always, you can rewatch the whole thing using this link.

Originally published at https://www.commonplace.is.

The government has announced it will support a tenfold expansion of the electric vehicle (EV) charging points in the next eight years.* The investment of £1.8 billion will support installing 270,000 charging points across the UK, bringing the total to 300,000 by 2030.

We’ve calculated that to be about 90 new chargers a day for eight years. This will include a number of electric car charger types — from ultra-high speed chargers at motorway services to slow chargers at long-stay points such as residential settings and workplaces. These could be a mix of solar electric car chargers and hive electric car chargers as well as rapid charge points.

The additional chargers will address a key limitation of EVs’ use — but where should these new chargers go?

Easily create your own electric car charging map with Commonplace! Our team will be more than happy to show you the tools to gather community data on where these new points should go.

Supporting your EV funding bids and local plans

The government has set aside £500 million for charging units to be located in communities, supporting “projects such as EV hubs and innovative on-street charging, so those without driveways don’t miss out on cleaner transport.” Funding will be provided through a £450 million Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (“LEVI”) fund**

Local authorities are invited to bid immediately for £10 million, which will fund three to eight local pilot projects focused on delivering charging points in communities, to support the transition to EVs.

Commonplace has been working on EV charging points for some time and can support several aspects of the charging point roll-out:

• Consulting the community about where to place new electric car chargers and crowdsourcing locations.
• Identifying demand for chargers and blockers to EV transition
• Getting feedback on different electric car charging point options and designs, both from the wider public and from specific stakeholder groups such as drivers with disabilities.
• Being a key part of local communication campaigns that bring the EV transition message to local communities, especially in areas where there is currently low take-up and relatively few electric car chargers.

While also giving the opportunity to gather community insight on where the new chargers should be located, an engagement website also opens up the opportunity to explain your plans in detail while also answering common questions surrounding electric car charging. For example, some of the most common queries are:

• Are electric car chargers standardized?/ Are all electric car chargers the same?: In most cases, electric car chargers are universal as all EV cars use the same standard plug for Level 1 and Level 2 charging. These are the two most commonly found EV chargers in the UK.
• How much power does an electric car charger use?: This will vary depending on the charger and the car. However, on average electric vehicles charging on a 240-volt level 2 charger will draw about 7,200 watts or less. To compare, an electric furnace uses about 10,000 watts.
• How to use a public electric car charger?: There are a number of companies that make electric car charging points and each is slightly different. Most will require you to use an app, website or RFID card to access them.
• Are electric car chargers free?/Are there free electric car chargers near me?: There are a number of free and paid electric car charging points across the UK, but the proportion will depend on where you are. For example, in Northern Ireland 70% of their EV chargers are free to use, while in London it is only 5%.

Giving local people clear answers to any burning questions they have will not only help clear up any confusion around electric car charging but also add a layer of trust in the scheme. This is helped by all questions and comments left being completely open to the public.

Electric car charger map — Commonplace projects

Take a look at a few of our own electric car charger map projects below.

Surrey County Council EV charging point map

With the number of electric vehicles growing in Surrey, the council are currently placing new public charging stations all over the county. If residents can’t charge at home, all they have to do is leave a pin on the map — https://surreyev.commonplace.is/

Work with community — based charging innovators Char.gy

Char.gy are installing their electric lamp post car chargers all across the UK to provide EV charging for residents without a driveway or convenient off-street charging location. Anyone can leave a pin on the map where they’d like to see one built- https://chargy.commonplace.is/

Greenwich EV lamppost charging

This project boosted electric car charging in London around Greenwich. Now residents can see their closest electric car charger on this map — https://greenwichlamppostcharging.commonplace.is

Electric car chargers — disparities in the national roll-out

On a national level, there is a huge regional disparity in availability of EV chargers. In January this year the government published figures for the number of chargers per 100,000 population in different parts of the UK ***. London electric car chargers are by far the most prevalent with 102 chargers per 100,000 population — despite having one of the lowest rates of car ownership in the country. This is over twice the GB average of 43 chargers per 100,000 population. Unique factors like the Congestion Charge have underpinned London’s lead and “early adopter” character. Nationally, the challenge is much bigger. Outside London, Scotland has the next highest number of chargers per 100,000–52. Wales has 33; the North East of England 36, and the North West of England just 24 chargers per 100,000 population. The lowest density of chargers is in Northern Ireland — 18 chargers per 100,000.

The figures demonstrate why in some parts of the country there may be a need to increase local awareness, which will improve as the infrastructure is more widespread.

More chargers can lower the entry cost to EV ownership

Having more charging points should also help with the affordability of EV’s, which are still more expensive to buy than internal combustion equivalents and are less abundant in the second-hand market. Having more chargers means that drivers are more confident of finding free electric car chargers when they need it and are therefore likely to spend less time at the charger — supporting lower-cost EVs — new or second-hand — with smaller batteries. This will make the EV transition more accessible financially.

Charging at or near home is an essential part of support for EVs and currently a major barrier. If you do not have a driveway or an allocated parking space at home, the current residential charging infrastructure is challenging.

Fortunately there are a growing number of enterprises devoted to finding solutions to curbside EV charging, usually working in close partnership with local authorities. A popular quick solution is adding charging points to lampposts — a solution being rolled out by Commonplace customer Char.gy, for example. Some local authorities are starting to roll out Community Charging hubs and there is further scope for innovation as cars that are connected to charging points can potentially offer “vehicle to grid” power — using the vehicles as buffer storage that the grid can draw on for short periods to address imbalances of supply and demand.

Commonplace has considerable in-house expertise and welcomes conversations with local authorities and entrepreneurs on supporting the community understanding of EV charging; facilitating community engagement and input to local infrastructure and helping accelerate green transition and crucial improvements in local air quality.

If you’re submitting a bid for this new EV fund or are implementing your own engagement to see where charging points would fit best in your local area, our expert team will be more than happy to show you how Commonplace can help out. Just book a free personalised consultation below!

(*) https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tenfold-expansion-in-chargepoints-by-2030-as-government-drives-ev-revolution

(**) https://www.gov.uk/guidance/apply-for-local-electric-vehicle-infrastructure-levi-pilot-funding

(***) https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/electric-vehicle-charging-device-statistics-january-2022/electric-vehicle-charging-device-statistics-january-2022

Originally published at https://www.commonplace.is.