If you're gearing up for a Scoping Consultation (formerly known as Regulation 18), you already know it's one of the biggest stages of the entire Local Plan process.
It's your first formal opportunity to share your draft Local Plan with the community, inviting feedback from residents, developers, landowners and statutory consultees on your vision for the area.
Get it right and you build momentum, get it wrong and you're spending the next few months trying to catch up.
The good news is that most of the things that catch planning teams off guard are completely avoidable. Here are five of the most common ones, straight from the planning officers who've been through it.
1. “We had no idea how many responses we'd get.”
Scoping Consultations can generate hundreds of representations, sometimes thousands.
If you haven't set up a clear system for managing them before your consultation opens, things can get overwhelming and time-consuming very quickly.
Think carefully about how you'll log, categorise and track responses as they come in. Who's responsible for what? How will you flag duplicates or incomplete submissions? How will you share data securely across your team?
Getting this sorted before day one means you're not scrambling to figure it out when responses are already flooding in.
Specialist consultation software like OpusConsult handles a lot of this quickly and with minimal effort, but having a clear internal workflow alongside it matters too.
2. “We thought our documents were accessible. They weren't.”
Under the Equality Act 2010, local planning authorities have a legal duty to make their consultations accessible to everyone, not just people who are already comfortable with planning jargon and PDF documents.
That means WCAG 2.2 AA compliant portals, accessible document formats and a clear process for supporting people who can't engage digitally.
Plus, the more accessible your consultation is, the more people take part, and the stronger your evidence base becomes.
3. “We published a notice on our website and hoped for the best.”
We hear this one a lot, and we completely understand why it happens…
There's a lot to think about when you're preparing for a Scoping Consultation. But a website notice alone is rarely enough to drive the engagement you need.
The planning teams that get the best response rates are the ones that shout about their consultation loudly and consistently, across email lists, social media, and community groups.
They also keep this going throughout the consultation period, not just at the start, making sure people know that the consultation is happening, and that their voice matters.
4. “We hadn't thought about what happens after it closes.”
Receiving lots of responses feels great. Working through them all is a different story entirely, especially for planning teams that are already stretched.
Before your consultation opens, it's really worth thinking through your assessment workflow. Who reviews responses? How do you prioritise? How do you track progress and make sure nothing slips through the cracks?
Having a clear plan in place before responses start coming in makes an enormous difference - trust us on this one.
5. "We wish we'd gone digital sooner."
If you're still managing your Scoping Consultation through spreadsheets and email, you're spending a lot of time on things that purpose-built software could be doing for you.
Councils that make the switch to specialist consultation software consistently tell us the same thing: it transforms how they work.
More responses come in online. Data is clean and ready to use from day one. Planning officers get to spend their time on actual planning work rather than manual data processing.
With the 30-month Local Plan deadline putting real pressure on teams across the UK right now, that time saving really counts.
Ready for your Scoping Consultation?
At JDi Solutions, we've been supporting local planning authorities with their consultations for over 20 years.
OpusConsult is purpose-built for planning policy teams, helping councils manage their Scoping, Reg 18 and 19 consultations and Call for Sites more efficiently, engaging more residents and producing cleaner, more usable data.
If you'd like to find out more, we'd love to chat! Book your free demo here.
TL;DR
Five things planning teams wish they'd known before their Scoping Consultation:
Plan for the volume of responses, make sure everything is genuinely accessible, promote it loudly and consistently, sort your assessment workflow before you go live, and don't wait to go digital.
OpusConsult can help with all of the above - find out more here.