This month, Glasgow City Council has put out an invitation in advance of the preparation of its Development Plan. The plan is aimed at setting out strategic land use changes in the city for the next 20 years, but the invitation asks participants to complete a survey on how the Council can engage with citizens and stakeholders during the production of the plan over the next 5 years. At the same time, residents of Yoker, Scotstoun, Jordanhill, Anniesland and Whiteinch have been asked to complete another survey on proposals to improve the liveability of their area, surely also a matter of land use.
Several inter-related issues concern us. Firstly, there is the question of what constitutes meaningful engagement for individual plans put forward by the Council. Secondly, this becomes more complex when there are a range of policies, strategies and plans with implications for a specific theme. Thirdly, and still yet more complex is the total volume of policies, strategies and plans for which the Council provides a consultation opportunity. According to its Consultation Hub, there have been 10 plans and strategies out for consultation which relate to, for example, its Neighbourhood, Regeneration and Sustainability Services, this year alone.
Let’s consider the issue of meaningful engagement briefly. A vast amount of research and experience has come together over many years about the role of the citizen in decision making about the matters that affect our lives. This ranges from non-participation to different levels of citizen power where citizens determine priorities and manage the processes involved. Once we have participated in elections, citizens have little real power in Scotland and we have to rely on our elected representatives to decide on policies and plans which will hopefully benefit us. There is a considerable amount of rhetoric about participation, engagement and consultation but in reality, strategies and plans for change are largely developed without us. When they do come out for consultation, they are often unclear and limited in scope, and their delivery feels tokenistic.
The most recent Council Strategy out for consultation is the draft Local Heat and Energy Efficiency Strategy, a matter which is key to the decarbonisation of heating and crucial for an effective response to the climate crisis. Those with knowledge about what is required have reported that the document is 197 pages long, confusing, misleading, ill-informed and incomplete. In order to respond, there are a set of pre-decided questions with little or no scope for comprehensive analysis and alternative proposals to be offered. Consultation is therefore mere window dressing.
But even if the proposed strategy was well written, clear and likely to be effective, it still sits alongside a multitude of other strategies and plans with implications for the management of the climate crisis. A quick search of the Consultation Hub had identified 14 different proposals over the past few years which all have a bearing on this paramount issue. Working out their relative significance and whether they interrelate effectively is surely beyond the knowledge base and the time available of even expert organisations, let alone individual citizens. For an overarching issue which affects us all other issues and us, as individuals, like the economy, another search of the Consultation Hub reveals that there have been 275 opportunities to comment, a feat which is surely impossible to realise.
In summary, this month’s short blog has tried to show that whilst we are notionally invited to have a say in the way our city is run and developed, in reality the process is tokenistic and meaningless. Not only is the process limited for individual strategies but the volume of policies, strategies and plans for which we would have to have a good working knowledge in order to be an effective judge of their meaning for the city, makes the task unable to be achieved.
Please let us have your thoughts on the value of consultation by Glasgow City Council and other public bodies in the city and on whether there are other ways in which citizens should be involved in deciding the priorities for the city and the means of implementing them.
USEFUL LINKS
Active Glasgow City Council Consultations:
Development Plan Consultation
Glasgow Liveable Neighbourhoods Consultation
Glasgow Local Heat and Energy Efficiency Strategy Consultation
To view current and past GCC Consultations:
Glasgow City Council Consultation Hub
For an overview of citizen participation:
Organising Engagement: Ladder of Citizen Participation
Thanks for this excellent blog which highlights the dilemmas of too much engagement and what meaningful participation really means.
In planning, Local Authorities are now obliged to consult the public on how to engage in their LDP as a first step to its preparation. In some ways this is in keeping with the National Standards of Community Engagement, which states that good engagement requires that “Partners are involved at the start of the process in identifying and defining the focus that the engagement will explore”.
It is of course pretty meaningless in this context unless all the elements of the National Standards are put into place, this requires resources being available to support proper engagement and crucially that ” Partners agree what the outcomes of the engagement process should be, what indicators will be used to measure success, and what evidence will be gathered”
Currently planning is under resourced, planners are required to consult with the public fairly extensively, but with precious few staff and within a shorter timescale than meaningful engagement allows. Meanwhile the planning system is geared towards delivering development and the developer is perceived as the chief customer in our neoliberal system, not the community.
It is difficult to know whether to recommend that people engage in a Local Development Plan process or not. We would say if you have time and energy it may be worth it, after all democratic planning requires civil society to engage. Even if at this stage your influence over what gets included may not be huge, if you don’t engage you might risk losing what little influence you do have.
Meanwhile organisations like SANE and Planning Democracy continue to press for a better planning system that understands the real value of proper public participation in planning, rather than seeing it as a token tick box exercise.
I thank Sue for a well-written and correctly argued blog.
Plans need to be ones which the public, the people who live in the city or work in the city, need and want, not what big businesses tell the Council that they need and want. Plans should be about meeting Glasgow’s needs and wishes – i.e. Glasgow people’s needs and wishes – not those of people whose main interest in the city is how much money they can make from it and from us.
I do not know if a city-wide development plan has ever been produced, but I do know that plans which have been introduced and implemented have come about with only a minimum, at best, of consultation with those who are not “the great and the good”: big business and public services in the main. Full consultation in a meaningful sense with the public, those who spend their lives in the city, must be a prerequisite of any production of plans and the results of that consultation – which should be publicly revealed – should form the basis of any resulting planning and all future development ideas should be measured against those results.
I think that same methodology should be employed whether a development plan is a city-wide one or one confined to one or more local areas of the city.
Only some Community Councils are active in areas of the city, but these are statutory bodies at arm’s length from the local authority and with responsibilities in the area which they represent. They could be one means of consulting local residents in their areas – public meetings; issuing of information about the consultation; perhaps a detailed list of questions with multiple-choice (“like”/”don’t like”/”not sure”) options for answers whose ease of answering might increase participation in the consultation process; encouraging more detailed and thorough responses from those who feel able to provide those; encouraging organisations which represent local people (community groups and third sector organisations, etc.) to submit responses on behalf of those they represent in the city/the area.
Trade unions should also have a voice as their local members will have views and will be affected by the eventual plans, perhaps even in terms of their conditions of service. Those with particular skills relevant to community development should also be invited to contribute their views.
Such a “full consultation” could produce information, statistics and a picture of public needs and wishes which would form the basis of future development and planning in the city and in areas of it – a “People’s Plan for Glasgow” similar in many respects to the one being developed by SANE. Future Council plans in the city should be measured against