Putting the finishing touches on a sustainable development scoreboard

Early last year, consultancy Iceni Projects launched the Sustainable Development Commission: a group of councils, developers, consultants and campaigners charged with coming up with a clear-cut way of defining sustainable development.

The commission, which includes representatives from Land Securities, Crest Nicholson and Birmingham, Cherwell and South Northamptonshire councils, as well as the Campaign to Protect Rural England, among others, wanted to come up with a practical tool - a scorecard - that could be used to assess whether a proposed project can fairly be described as sustainable.

With the scorecard now approaching completion, Property Week caught up with Ian Anderson, executive director at Iceni Projects, for a progress report.

How close are you to coming up with a final model?

The commission has had five meetings now. The last one before Christmas was actually a study trip organised by Sue Smith, joint chief executive of Cherwell and South Northamptonshire councils. We went to see the north-west Bicester eco-town and that brought an interesting perspective. They’re going to apply the principles of the scorecard to their schemes. Likewise, we’ve been trialling it on some of the projects that we’ve been working on and Land Securities has been doing trial runs on some of its projects.

It sounds like it’s almost ready to roll…

It’s been the iterative process that we always knew it was going to be. Inevitably, if you drop a load of different people with different backgrounds into a room, you’re going to get people coming at a problem from different directions. But through that iterative process, we’ve now got a working draft for the scorecard that we think you can apply to schemes that are emerging through the planning application route.

Will it also work for site allocation in the plan-making process?

What’s become apparent is that there probably will be two versions of the scorecard: one that you apply to planning applications and another that you apply to taking a scheme through a development plan route - so where you’re trying to justify or assess one particular site’s allocation against another one.

How will the scorecard function in practice?

At the moment we’re running it through a spreadsheet, which is a bit clunky, but the bones of it are there and we intend to turn it into a web-based tool. The reason we think it will be better as an interactive web-based model is that it will allow us to build in a series of way-finder questions, so that anyone using it will be guided towards the relevant questions. So rather than somebody being asked a load of questions about mineral extraction when they’re bringing forward a town centre retail development, the way-finder questions would mean they wouldn’t need to bother with irrelevant questions.

You’re directed to the relevant areas - housing or transport, for example - and it boils down the questions to those particular subjects. So when you’re doing your assessment, you’re graded against relevant questions. Projects aren’t being unfairly discriminated against or promoted. It’s those sorts of aspects we took a long time discussing with the panel members.

Has there been much disagreement between members of the commission?

We deliberately went out of our way to get a broad church with people with different opinions. We always felt that a commission that is made up of different people who have strong opinions and that generates rigorous debate is a good thing. You want to see off as many issues as possible within the commission before you present it to others.

If we’d just done it within Iceni and then taken it to the market, you can guarantee that there would be people saying: ‘You haven’t allowed for different views.’ So there has been debate and disagreement, but it’s been a really positive process and the most important thing is that all the members feel that they can recommend it as a useful tool.

Have the commission’s members remained the same throughout?

We’ve kept the same organisations involved, although we’ve had different individuals from organisations coming in and out at different times. The corporate make-up has stayed the same, but Land Securities, for instance, has brought in different people with different expertise. The same applies to Birmingham council.

What are the next steps?

What we’re hoping to do is present it in a couple of weeks’ time and get sign-off for the development management scorecard, which can then be shined up and polished and turned into a user-friendly version that can be launched in the spring. We then want to get it out there and in use. We’ll also continue to work on the development plan version, which will take a bit longer.

Do you have the in-house expertise to produce something that will be genuinely user-friendly?

We use a series of companies to help with our marketing and communications - we work closely with a company up in Leeds called Communicate - and the idea is that there will be a standalone website that anyone can use, whether that’s you, me, a planning authority or a developer.

It’s very much about keeping it as accessible as possible and using layman’s terms so that people aren’t put off from using it because they think they need a PhD in sustainability in order to use it. It’s about keeping it in the centre ground and keeping everybody focused on the same criteria.

Is it largely quantitative or qualitative?

There will still be individual interpretation. So if I think a project scores 1 on access to public transport, for example, somebody else might think it scores 2. But it’s still about getting people to focus on the same criteria to bring that clarity and focus when decisions are being made.

So you think it will still help to get people to agree on a scheme’s merits?

I think it should help build consensus. The chances are there will be differences in how different groups score something, but I don’t think that’s a weakness. If we have to have a conversation about where our areas of difference are, that isn’t a bad thing because it narrows the areas of difference between parties.

Do you think it could play any formal role in the planning system?

What we would dearly love is that when it comes out the government will recommend it as a tool that can help with decision-making but also help people understand decision-making. I don’t know where it will then be taken, whether it could be endorsed through supplementary planning guidance or whether somebody simply says it’s good practice and should be looked at by authorities. The first step will be that if the councils on the commission feel it has value they will recommend it to applicants and their members. If they then recommend it to other authorities then with a fair wind it will gain traction.

Have you been speaking to the communities department about it?

We’ve had some light-touch conversations and we’ve agreed that once we’re in a position to present it we will pick up on it with them. We’ve also had some discussions with the UK Green Building Council on how it could be applied. It’s fantastic that we’ve got groups like that who can see the potential.

Will Iceni make any money out of the website?

We’re not anticipating trying to say that you can only use it if you instruct Iceni. I think it would lose value if we did that. We’ve essentially done this because we think it will add value - another layer of understanding to the National Planning Policy Framework.

Putting my Iceni business-winning cap on, clearly we’d like people to see that if we’ve been the initiators of this project then we’re as well placed as anybody to advise on how you apply the scorecard when it comes into play. But it’s not just owned by Iceni - that would be unfair to the other people involved in the commission, apart from anything else.