Trust Issues: fixing public consultation to speed up housing delivery
Researcher
The United Kingdom has a serious housing crisis. Rising house prices have consistently outstripped real wage growth, home ownership amongst young people has plummeted over the past 20 years, and the supply of new homes has consistently fallen well short of ever-increasing demand.
To address this, the government has set a bold target: build 1.5 million homes this Parliament. It’s an ambitious goal, and one that, so far, shows little sign of being met. Achieving it will require a multifaceted approach, targeting the numerous obstacles and blockers head on. Squarely on the agenda for reform is the planning process, with efforts underway to accelerate approvals and get spades in the ground faster.
One part of the puzzle, however, rarely gets serious consideration: the broken relationship between the public, property developers, and local planning departments. Arrive late to a planning consultation event, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled into a low-budget pantomime. The musical numbers are thin, but the villains - developers and planning officers - draw derision and angry titters from an audience all too familiar with the production and their role within it.
I’ve attended many of these tense affairs. There’s often a pervasive sense of distrust - of developers, who are seen as slick operators chasing profit, and of planning officers, who are viewed as complicit or indifferent. It’s easy to dismiss the resistance as nothing more than predictable NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard – ism) from bored locals with too much time. But in truth, the scepticism is well earned.
Many local people feel ignored, and often they have a point. For major developments, consultation requirements are surprisingly loose. Local authorities have wide discretion over how consultations are run - and with overstretched teams, the result is often a bare-minimum effort: a few presentation boards. A perfunctory Q&A. A ticked box.
This process often manages to achieve the worst of both worlds. Its perfunctory nature fails to give communities real input into local development or improve the quality and appropriateness of new homes. Instead, these events tend to inflame existing tensions and deepen distrust in planning institutions—leaving attendees feeling like children handed a toy phone to distract them from the real thing. Cue dozens of objections, heightened local anger, and further delays to the very developments we need most.
Given this dysfunctional status quo, coupled with the pressing need to speed up every aspect of housing delivery, it is hardly surprising that planning reform discussions often centre on streamlining the consultation process further. This risks pouring fuel onto an already combustible situation, whilst missing the opportunity to rebuild faith in the system by making sure it works as intended.
Done properly, consultation can be very productive. It can build trust and lines of communication. It can improve schemes. Developers can gain valuable local insight. Residents can help shape projects that bring the new homes, public spaces, and amenities best suited to their area. The key is genuine engagement - early, open, and inclusive. That means reaching beyond the usual voices, investing in relationships with communities, and maintaining dialogue throughout the life of a project.
This should go hand in hand with modernising the process to enable the inclusion of the many people who may support local development but can’t attend in-person events due to work, childcare, or other commitments. As it stands, consultation events often attract only the most available, most engaged, and most outraged, participants, resulting in feedback that doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of the wider community.
This needn’t be costly. It needn’t delay things. Consultation workshops and engagement events can easily sit within existing project timelines. What’s needed is a cultural shift: one that sees consultation not as a box to tick, but as a critical tool for building better places, and for tackling reflexive NIMBYism and rebuilding trust in a planning system that desperately needs it to achieve the housing revolution we have been promised.