Digital Support for the Local Plan

The platform should enable community engagement in an accessible format to reach a wide audience. The platform should be user friendly with a legible, intuitive set up, allowing as many persons as possible to find the information that they are looking for and allowing them to easily give their opinions. The platform should also allow people to be kept up to date and have a record of their responses, with the ability to respond again and track changes to the key documents. It is expected that the platform will demonstrate that it has reached a wider audience than the standard consultation method of a Council website, and the benefits should be clearly listed. The Platform should be accessible on a wide range of devices, and this should be demonstrable to further ensure accessibility.

The consultation reviewer should use AI technology to sort, summarise and analyse trends of consultation responses to the local plan consultation. The platform should be able to summarise them, highlighting that AI has been used for anyone reviewing the summary. Key words will be identified to group consultation responses into categories and subcategories, enabling the reader to see that they are site specific where applicable. This system will reduce the time taken to track and review consultation responses and will allow for results to be seen through a search as well as in full. Responses can be catalogued and placed in relevant areas for reference when the policies are being reviewed against the responses. While we would still utilise a human / humans to review all responses, the time reduction will come from sorting and summarising them and applying them to relevant parts and themes of the policy document.

The system will provide a back of house function to write, edit, publish and track changes to the Local Plan. The writer will ideally work collaboratively with other elements to engage the responses to the Plan