Major advances in the application of digital technologies to the planning system during lockdown reveal a glimpse of how they can affect development and consultation over the long-term. But there is still a place for traditional methods in ensuring that hard-to-reach communities get a say in their local environments.

That was the key message to emerge from ‘Digital Planning’, an NLA webinar held on Zoom on Wednesday and chaired by Central director Patricia Brown. The words we keep hearing include ‘unprecedented’, said Brown, but also how ‘disrupt’, especially in how digital is ‘accelerating change across planning.

GLA head of change and delivery, planning, Peter Kemp said this was a ‘massive area’ given how planning had not kept up to date with other industries in the way that data is used and how residents’ expectations could be serviced. Post-COVID learning, he said, was likely to be about how important live, real time data could be, with a lot of work going on around existing stock and constraints as well as schemes on the table. ‘It’s one thing to have a lot of information but you only really get the insight when you connect those bits of information together’, he said.

London Communications Agency director Chris Madel outlined how his firm is investigating new forms of online consultation on projects including ‘hub’ websites, virtual exhibitions and an LCA development and engagement platform it is developing. ‘Digital engagement is here to stay - its use and popularity is just being accelerated now‘, he said. There was still a place for traditional forms of consultation such as face to face as well, however, with some developers and architects joining forces with local charities and organisations to get to hard-to-reach groups who woul never go to an exhibition. Pollard Thomas Edwards associate partner Justin Laskin, moreover, said that his practice had been terrified about whether it would all actually work but had been pleasantly surprised how the practice had taken to digital, excelling in particular in a planning application video walk through it devised for Waltham Forest that resulted in a quick permission and the authority wanting to use it as a standard. ‘We have always prided ourselves on not being tick-box consulters‘, Laskin said.

The session, viewable here, also included panel discussion from Sarah Wardle, associate director at BEVG, who questioned how online engagement could be made more appealing, that local authorities should improve in the way they handle controversial applications, digitally, and suggested that the key issue was in the development industry getting trust and the respect of stakeholders. ‘That is exactly the same with digital consultation’, she said. Finally Rachel Feenstra, head of marketing at VU.City said that 80 % of local authorities now use its software to help with applications, with its move to offer a cut-down version part of its ambition to become the ‘Wikipedia of the digital planning world.’

·     Chair Patrica Brown recollected that Roger Madelin was known as ‘Martini Man’ for the way he was ‘anytime, any place, any where’ when it came to eliciting face to face consensus during consultation for the King’s Cross project for Argent