Wakefield Council have recently been in the news over their proposal to buy a former golf house building as part of a wider scheme to extend a traveller site. The proposal, first agreed by the Council’s cabinet in July was referred back to the cabinet by the overview and scrutiny committee, who suggested that they were ‘sneaking the decision through the back door’, and raised concerns about the lack of consultation on the proposals. When the decision came back before the cabinet however, they made the same decision again.

Their reasoning was simple- there is no usual practice of consulting on property acquisitions. It’s a reasonable argument, and it might be a good representation of the line between communications and consultation. We know from the law that there are a limited number of circumstances in which consultation obligations can actually arise, and that there is no general obligation to consult on every decision. This is almost certainly one that falls into that final category.

As we mentioned however, the reason for this purchase is to allow for the extension (at a cost of £5.8m) to a traveller site in the district, and what is almost certainly true is that there will be, or will have been consultation on the more general proposals at other stages of the development. The general scheme was first contemplated in the emerging Wakefield District Local Plan 2036, a new version of the Local Plan which has been slowly proceeding through the statutory process since the first consultation opened in October 2020.

This might then not necessarily be a case of poor (or indeed absent) consultation, but more one where the council has not adequately communicated how different stages of a development going from proposal through to adoption and then on to construction work. Good communication of how these processes work is a vital part of laying the groundwork (if you’ll forgive the pun) for a positive ongoing relationship and a successful project.

Travellers’ sites often prove controversial, and we have seen issues around them coming up in court. They often prove to be nexuses of local opposition and uncertainty, often compounded by the fact that the travelling community falls very firmly into the ‘seldom heard’ category of consultees that we all need to become better at reaching in our work.

We’ll keep an eye on this case on the off chance it develops into anything more serious. For now, it proves a reminder of the gnarly and sometimes difficult subject of the lines between consultation and comms, and how these interact to forestall public dissatisfaction and protest.