What role does communication play in controversial planning decisions?

For most of my working life, I’ve been on the inside of contested decisions. I’ve helped organisations explain difficult, unpopular choices in environments where scrutiny is intense, legal challenge always possible, and public confidence cannot be taken for granted. I’m a former journalist, and I’ve spent more than 30 years working in public affairs and corporate communications across nuclear, water and other often controversial sectors.

What I hadn’t experienced until recently was what those same systems feel like when you’re on the outside – as a resident, trying to make sense of a planning process that is already well under way. 

I didn’t set out to become an activist. I’m not instinctively oppositional, and I’m not against development in principle. My concerns were specific and, I thought, fairly ordinary: whether a large housing development, on top of significant other residential schemes in my town, was being thrust upon the community without adequate supporting infrastructure or serious consideration of alternative brownfield sites.

That was enough to tip me into a role I’d never expected to occupy. Not a campaigner by inclination but a reluctant activist by circumstance. Planning, from this side, feels very different. National policy is clear enough: build more homes, faster and with fewer ecological constraints. Local authorities are under pressure to deliver growth while managing infrastructure limits, political risk and shrinking resources. I understand that. I’ve advised organisations operating under similar constraints.

But as a resident, what you feel first is not policy pressure – it’s imbalance. Developers arrive with a small army of planning consultants, ecology surveys, transport assessments and legal advice. They speak the language fluently. They repeat their case, refine it, and resource it properly. Residents arrive with questions and a growing pile of often unintelligible online documents that assume previous knowledge of how the system works. Developers operate inside planning every day. Residents drop in part-way through, often after the broad shape of a proposal has already been agreed.

Seen through a Grunig lens, planning rarely feels like an equal conversation.* Residents are consulted but the system is designed around professional expertise and institutional familiarity. Developers and planners know how it works; residents are left to catch up. The result is dialogue without parity – participation without anything approaching equal footing. The imbalance isn’t just financial. It’s about time, familiarity, confidence and access – and it shapes everything. Experiencing council communication from this side of the fence has been sobering. Responses from the planning department to enquiries were often slow and at times less than helpful. Replies tended to be brief, technical and narrowly framed. Questions were answered. Context rarely was.

When the press office declines to respond

One episode in particular sticks with me. Local residents were asking whether the council intended to defend the councillors’ surprise refusal of the housing application at appeal. A local journalist picked this up and approached the council press office for comment. The press office declined to respond. From a professional standpoint — as a former press officer — this simply isn’t done. Failing to respond creates a vacuum that others will fill. I was flabbergasted, as was the journalist. That said, the appeal was virtually inevitable and the legal risk real. Anything said publicly could be scrutinised or used against the authority.

But from the resident’s side it felt very different. These weren’t abstract questions. They went to the heart of democratic accountability: would the council stand by its decision, or quietly step back from it? The refusal to comment didn’t feel neutral. It felt like distance — a closing of ranks at precisely the moment residents were trying to understand what was happening.

The planning portal didn’t help. It was clunky, often unavailable and difficult to navigate. Individually, these were small frustrations. Together, they made participation harder and reinforced the sense that the system was not designed with ordinary users in mind.

Over time, a familiar perception took hold: that the developer’s case – professionally presented, repeatedly restated and backed by substantial resources – carried more weight than local concerns about environment, safety and cumulative impact. This was particularly evident at the critical planning committee meeting, where resident and other stakeholder objections were reduced to single-line summaries that captured neither their substance nor their volume.

Whether that perception was fair is almost beside the point. Once it takes hold, it shapes trust – and trust, once lost, is hard to recover. None of this led me to conclude that council communications teams were failing. But when council officers recommended approval of the application, it was difficult not to feel that local concerns about inadequate infrastructure and the threat to the environment had been acknowledged only in outline, rather than fully engaged with.

If anything, it raised a more uncomfortable question: what role is communication actually able to play in controversial planning decisions? Communication was clearly present. But it seemed to me to be tightly constrained, largely invisible or focused almost entirely on statutory compliance rather than public understanding.

I recognised the situation. In high-risk environments, organisations become more cautious. Legal defensibility becomes paramount. Saying less feels safer than saying more. Internally, that logic makes sense but externally – especially to people affected by decisions – it can feel like withdrawal. Constraint doesn’t mean communication disappears. But without explanation, it can feel as though it has.

Communication at the edge of its limits

One of the things I’ve observed is how neutrality can be understood differently. In planning, neutrality often seems to mean minimising comment. In broader communication practice, neutrality is more commonly associated with fairness, clarity and consistency. Being neutral doesn’t mean going quiet. It can mean explaining how decisions are made, what can and can’t be taken into account, and where influence genuinely sits – even when the answer is uncomfortable. That isn’t advocacy or spin, it’s clarity.

In my experience, when residents raise concerns about roads, schools or healthcare, they are rarely trying to block development outright. They are asking whether housing growth is being matched by infrastructure delivery, whether cumulative impacts have been properly assessed, and whether alternatives have been meaningfully considered.

When those questions feel marginal, the problem isn’t procedural fairness. It’s confidence in the system: confidence that people are being listened to, that trade-offs are acknowledged rather than smoothed over, and that residents aren’t simply the least powerful participants in the room. This isn’t a nimby problem. It’s a confidence gap. And as housing delivery accelerates, that gap matters.

For the PR profession, planning is an uncomfortable but revealing test case. It shows communication operating at the edge of its limits – constrained, cautious and often unseen. But it also shows where communication’s public value is most exposed: not in persuasion, but in making power visible, process intelligible, and disagreement something people can at least recognise as fair.

That is the lesson I’ve taken from becoming, reluctantly, an activist – and one that may be worth wider reflection within the profession. And the lesson for residents? It is not that engagement is futile, but that it takes place on uneven ground – and that recognising those limits early may be the only way to engage without losing trust, time or hope in the process.

*Grunig & Hunt’s two-way asymmetrical model is set out in Managing Public Relations (1984).

Peter Osborne is a former journalist with more than three decades of experience in corporate communications and public affairs, working at the sharp end of contested and high-risk decisions, often involving the delivery of major infrastructure projects in the nuclear and water sectors – where public scrutiny, legal challenge and issues of trust are constant features. He has also worked in the public sector, including the police and probation services, as well as for third-sector organisations. His professional background informs this blog.