Hounslow and Chesterfield Innovate Consultation Management with Technology Pilot

The London Borough of Hounslow and Chesterfield Borough Council have embarked on a collaborative pilot programme aimed at enhancing the management of consultation responses through innovative digital tools. This initiative has reportedly streamlined response processing and improved consistency, ultimately allowing planning officers to dedicate more time to community engagement and developmental projects.

The Planning Challenge

Consultation processes for local planning can generate significant volumes of feedback, often submitted in various formats such as emails, PDFs, and online portal entries. Traditionally, officers have allocated weeks to manually collate comments into spreadsheets, dissect lengthy submissions for topical relevance, and draft uniform responses. This laborious method prolongs consultations and limits opportunities for effective community interaction.

Hounslow and Chesterfield sought to achieve several objectives:

• Minimise the time taken to process incoming responses.
• Enhance consistency and transparency in managing feedback across multiple consultations.
• Provide officers with more effective tools to tag, assign, and analyse responses.
• Directly link comments to relevant sites and evidence files.
• Develop a system suitable for future consultations that integrates with existing databases.

What They Did

The two councils collaborated to design and pilot new software for managing consultation responses, utilising the PlaceMaker platform. Their approach involved several key steps:

• Partnering with Urban Intelligence to outline the entire process of handling consultation feedback.
• Identifying specific challenges such as the manual entry of comments and the need for consistent categorisation.
• Refining objectives with guidance from service designers, focusing on representation processing and the creation of consultation statements.
• Conducting weekly design and development sessions to encourage agile improvements.
• Testing features during Hounslow’s live consultation related to a supplementary planning document, while Chesterfield prepared for its local plan consultation.

The pilot produced several new features designed to assist planning officers:

• Capability to process responses in various formats.
• Automatic segmentation of lengthy submissions into manageable parts.
• Tagging comments by themes, policies, or specific sites.
• Assignment of responsibilities to individual officers.
• Utilisation of shared response templates for improved consistency.
• Integration of GIS layers and site information into comments.
• Development of a unified database for tracking consultations.

Results and Impact

The pilot has yielded significant gains in both efficiency and consistency. Key findings from Hounslow include:

• A reduction in processing time from 55 minutes per comment to just 30 minutes.
• A 45% decrease in officer hours spent on tagging and categorising comments.
• Improved uniformity across teams thanks to shared templates.
• Enhanced contextual understanding through GIS integration.
• Development of a reusable contact database for future consultations.
• Better coordination through the ability to track assignments and workloads in one location.

What They Learned

The councils gained several insights through their experience:

• Digital solutions can significantly cut the time expended on processing feedback.
• While summarising and tagging still require human judgment, there is potential for future AI enhancements.
• Regular collaboration with technology suppliers accelerates the refinement process.
• A single, consolidated database fosters consistency and facilitates comparison across different consultations.
• Clearly defining project scope from the outset can prevent broad initial plans.
• User experience and interface design support are essential for translating needs into effective features.

Future Plans

Both councils plan to implement the newly developed system in future consultations and are considering further automation, including AI-assisted tagging and summarising. They also aim to refine the process for integrated consultation modules, which would minimise manual data entry. Chesterfield is set to begin live testing during its upcoming consultation, while both councils explore expanding this functionality to additional planning tasks and possibly across other council services.

Source: official statements, news agencies, and public reports.

https://www.gov.uk/government/case-studies/hounslow-and-chesterfield-cut-response-processing-time-by-45