One of the things that most annoys people is when government departments or businesses ask for their views in a consultation exercise when they have next to no interest in hearing anything that disagrees with their original plans – and even less interest in changing them in any meaningful way.
Such fake consultations have become common practice when decisions are made about planning applications. The good news is that we live in a democracy so anyone is free to comment on any planning application that is made in this country. The bad news is that we also live with bureaucracy so it is highly unlikely that your support or objection about a development will actually make any difference.
Following the planning rules
What matters when it comes to a planning decision is not the views of the public but the rules and regulations that cover planning. Most planning applications are made by experts who know those rules. Ordinary people have little hope of being able to know enough about them to make a comment on a planning application, which an expert will take seriously. If it doesn’t comply with the rules then your view will simply be dismissed as not in line with policy and therefore irrelevant.
There is some justification for this. It is good to have clear rules about what is allowed, that apply equally to all. Yet if the approach is taken too far then it simply excludes the public from a real opportunity to influence events in their neighbourhood and generates hugely damaging cynicism. Perfectly sound reasons to support or oppose a development get dismissed (even if they are held by the vast majority of the public) because the professionals have woven a complex web of regulations that ordinary people can never hope to navigate.
The public is allowed to speak but not allowed to be listened to.
The situation isn’t even improved much if the local residents who care about a planning issue get someone elected onto the council, who wants to represent their views. The councillors who sit on planning committees are constantly reminded by officers that they carry a legal responsibility not to represent the people who elected them, but to follow the planning laws. Any councillor who breaks ranks and persuades a committee to listen to local concerns that diverge from the complex rules risks exposing council taxpayers to a hefty fine when the developer appeals against the decision.
Deliberate system bias
The planning system is set up with a deliberate bias at its heart. A local resident who wishes to appeal against a decision in favour of building something, can’t. There is no meaningful mechanism for them to appeal against a decision that has been issued by the local authority that is supposed to represent them. A developer who wishes to appeal against something being rejected can not only do so but can also claim back significant sums in costs.
This is only one example of the way that the public is technically allowed to participate in decision making, but in practice shut out from doing so effectively. A very commonly applied technique is to pump out a consultation that includes strictly limited choices about how a particular change should happen without including the option that the change shouldn’t happen at all.
That was what happened when North Yorkshire County Council decided to launch a hostile takeover of the district councils within its borders. There was a large and expensive consultation exercise, that didn’t include the preference held by large numbers of the public, which was to retain their district council. There was no referendum on the change. No local election was ever held, in which the option of not doing it was up for debate.
Consultation questions were only asked about how the change should happen and were accompanied by grand promises of major savings. Now that the merger has happened, my local residents have a local council that sits over 50 miles away from where they live and hasn’t made anything like the promised savings.
The ultimate fake consultation: the EU referendum
Yet if there was to be a prize for fake consultation exercises it should perhaps go to the national referendum that was held in 2016. Back then, the public were asked for their opinion on whether they liked politicians’ promises about the post Brexit-world, or believed politicians’ threats about what it would bring. I can’t say I was astonished when most people preferred the promises.
We were never given an opportunity to vote on the realities of Brexit. The final deal was never put before the British people to see what we thought of what had actually been negotiated and it was rammed through parliament before most MPs had even had a chance to read the deal properly. Whichever way ordinary people voted, there can be few who believe that they have got what they wanted.
Those who believed that Britain would become great and prosperous again if it left the EU, must be wondering what has happened to that dream as the cost-of-living crisis mounts. Astonishingly, some have concluded that the key error was that the dream hasn’t been pushed through hard and fast enough yet. Others have looked on in horror as Liz Truss naively tried to do just that and begun to question whether dire warnings that were characterised as ‘project fear’ have turned out to be true.
Despite neither of the two largest political parties in the country being prepared to ask serious questions about whether we were conned, there is now a very strong majority in opinion polls that holds the view that Brexit was a mistake.
A lot of people on both sides in the referendum have become convinced that once again, their opinions have been asked for but the things they really wanted weren’t actually available to be chosen and they have just used and then ignored. Brexit is likely to go down in history as the biggest fake consultation exercise ever.
The government never did get Brexit done. Instead the public got done by Brexit.
