In my non-transport life, I am a Town Councillor on my local Town Council. On that Town Council, I am a member of the grandly-titled Planning Improvement Working Group. What this group intends to do is get the best possible outcomes for the town from the planning system.

In practice, what this means is talking to the local planning authority on the Local Plan, monitoring developments as they come forward and are built, and responding to applications. Right now we are dealing with an absolute belter. 200 new homes on green belt land. We have worked hard to make people aware of the application, and to get local people to comment on it.

Doing it, we have learned a hard lesson. While you must do all you can to engage people as plans come forward, you need to pick and choose your times. Grand plans for public meetings and community events faltered quickly when the developer and the local planning authority refused to engage. Plus there is a particularly active local residents group opposing the application.

But that wasn’t what put paid to our plans. The UK planning process is a funny thing. By the time it gets to the planning application stage, there is a very high chance that the application for the development will be granted. Around 88% of planning applications in England are approved. Many sites are allocated in the Local Plan, which goes through a number of rounds of consultation in its development. And once in the Local Plan, chances are it will be built.

Yet, the first time that people hear of planned development is when the application goes in. So, here is a question. Is it worth extensively engaging with people at a time in the process when the outcome is almost certain?

That’s maybe a bad way of framing it, but my experience recently about how hard it is to be reactive has given pause for thought. Maybe, a more effective way to engage with people is to engage them extensively at the start – on the aims, objectives, and influencing things that are done – and then leaving engagement at the end to focus on details and not principles.

In a time when peoples time (and budgets) are low, maybe there is something to that. As much as we would love to engage everyone, extensively, all the time, good engagement needs to be both effective and engaging, rather than lots of it.

Maybe we, as transport planners, need to be honest with people on that. Rather than say “you can have your say during the statutory consultation,” we should say “if you have your say now, it will change what we are doing more than if you do it later.” Be honest with people for once. And let them decide how best to use their valuable time.

Don’t just do more public engagement. Be smart with it.