Part 2: Community consultation reflected in the long-term plan
Consulting with the community on the long-term plan is critical to building and maintaining trust and confidence and to ensure that community concerns and views are fully considered in the final long-term plan.
The Local Government Act requires councils to prepare consultation documents. The purpose of a consultation document is to provide an effective basis for public participation in local authority decision-making processes about the content of a council’s long-term plan.
We consider it good practice for the long-term plan to include a concise summary of the issues presented in the consultation document, the community feedback on the options provided, the council’s final decisions, and the rationale for those decisions (where it is not clearly aligned to the community feedback).
What to aim for and what to avoid
| What to aim for: |
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| The long-term plan demonstrates that the council has listened (but not necessarily agreed) to the feedback that it has received from the community on the options through the consultation process. The summary of the consultation process is concise, easily accessible, and understandable. The summary also clearly describes the feedback (for example, using statistics, graphs, and charts) and the impact on decision-making, including on levels of service. |
| What to avoid: |
|---|
| An incomplete summary of key aspects of the community feedback from the consultation process and of how consultation affected decision-making. |
Examples of good practice
Tararua District Council
What we liked in Tararua District Council’s 2021-2031 long-term plan
The Council describes each topic concisely and outlines the options consulted on, the support provided by the community, and decisions made by the Council after consulting with the community.
Ashburton District Council
What we liked in Ashburton District Council’s 2021-2031 long-term plan
In Ashburton District Council’s long-term plan:
- Engaging with the community is connected to one of its outcomes (“Residents are included and have a voice”) to identify the public’s priorities and matters of interest for the long term. This informs the focus of the long-term plan.
- There is a concise and clear summary of feedback from the community.
- The timeline of the different engagements the council had with its community is shown in a simple and effective way and lists the key topics that the community decided, ranking them in order of importance.
Napier City Council
What we liked in Napier City Council’s 2021-2031 long-term plan
The Council engaged the community early to understand public interest and seek community views on what was important to them. This helped inform the focus of the consultation document and the long-term plan. The feedback from the consultation process was summarised clearly and at a high level. The Council clearly and simply described the consultation process, breakdown of responses, and decisions.
