For scheme communications, consents & assurance leads
The checklist went. The record stayed.
On 24 July 2026 the statutory pre-application consultation requirements for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects were repealed outright. No Statement of Community Consultation. No Preliminary Environmental Information Report. No transitional arrangements. What replaced them is guidance, common law, and the thing that was always doing the real work anyway — a defensible record of who you spoke to, what they said, and what you did about it.
What changed
Statutory pre-application consultation was repealed on 24 July 2026.
The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 removed sections 42, 43, 44, 45, 47 and 49 of the Planning Act 2008 with effect from 24 July 2026, brought into force by the Act's Commencement No. 4 and Transitional Provisions Regulations 2026. That repeals the statutory duty to consult, the Statement of Community Consultation, the Preliminary Environmental Information Report and the duty to have regard to consultation responses, for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects in England and Wales. There are no transitional arrangements. Consultation itself has not been abolished — it has been moved from a statutory checklist to non-statutory guidance issued under section 50 of the Planning Act 2008, and to the common law consultation principles known as the Gunning principles.
Read that again slowly, because the commentary on it has been noisy. Nobody has said engagement stopped mattering. What has gone is the part that told you when you had done enough of it. For nearly two decades an applicant could point at a signed-off SoCC and a PEIR and say: that is the standard, and we met it. From 24 July, the answer to "was your engagement adequate?" is no longer a document you can hold up. It is a judgement — made at acceptance stage, made by an Examining Authority, and, if it goes wrong, made in a courtroom against the Gunning tests.
Practitioner commentary published as the reforms landed put the risk plainly: inconsistent practice across projects, uncertainty at acceptance, and exposure to legal challenge. That is not a reason to do less. It is a reason to be able to prove more.
What counts now
Engagement you cannot evidence is engagement you did not do.
With the statutory template gone, the evidence of community engagement on a UK scheme is the record itself: a single, date-stamped account of every contact — who made it, when, on which channel, what they raised, what they were told, what was promised and whether it happened. Anecdote does not survive scrutiny. A register does.
Every assurance regime that touches a scheme is asking the same question in a different accent. An Examining Authority asks whether the community was genuinely given the chance to influence something still capable of being influenced. A Considerate Constructors assessor — working to the updated Code and Checklist that applies from 5 May 2026, with Community, Environment and Workforce weighted equally across 24 themes — asks what you actually did and rates it not met, partially met or fully met. A client's community requirement asks for a monthly report. A councillor asks why nobody rang back.
None of those are satisfied by good intentions. They are satisfied by four things, and only four:
Someone answers
A route in that works at the hour the disturbance actually happens. Night closures, dust at 6am, a hoarding panel down in the wind on a Sunday. A voicemail box is a record of a missed contact, not of engagement.
In their words, not yours
A complaint paraphrased by the organisation being complained about is worth very little in an assurance review. Recorded as the caller said it, timestamped, categorised, it is evidence.
The clock starts and is met
The published benchmark is an acknowledgement within two working days. A line that acknowledges during the call satisfies that clock before anyone at the scheme has read the entry.
Something happened, and it is written down
What was promised, by whom, by when, and whether it was done. This is the column most registers are thinnest on, and the first one an assessor reads.
The benchmark
The biggest scheme in the country publishes its numbers.
HS2 Ltd's Residents' Charter commits to a freephone community helpline 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and to acknowledging questions and complaints within 2 working days, responding within a maximum of 20 working days where the query cannot be answered straight away. In February 2026 HS2 Ltd published its performance against that standard: 1,067 complaints received between April and December 2025, 98% resolved within 20 working days, all concluded at the first stage, and 100% of urgent construction-related enquiries and complaints responded to within 2 working days.
Those figures are HS2 Ltd's, published in the Chair's response to the first independent report of the HS2 Residents' and Construction Commissioner, dated 26 February 2026 and hosted on gov.uk. They are not ours and we do not claim them. What matters is that they exist at all.
A published commitment can be dismissed as a leaflet. A published commitment with a published score against it, scrutinised by an independent commissioner, is a benchmark — and benchmarks travel. The resident ringing a £4m junction improvement at eleven at night does not know it isn't HS2. Neither does the councillor they ring next. Neither, increasingly, does the client drafting community requirements into the next contract.
So the question a scheme should be able to answer in 2026 is not "are we required to have a line?" It is "if someone asked us for our numbers, could we produce them?"
The gap
One liaison officer cannot be awake for three years.
The practical obstacle to an evidenced engagement record is not willingness. It is hours. A community liaison officer works office hours on a scheme that generates its most emotive contacts outside them, and the calls that go unanswered at 11pm are precisely the ones that become a complaint, a councillor's email or a village Facebook thread by Monday.
The usual answers all have the same hole in them. An out-of-hours mobile depends on one person's evening. A general answering service takes a message but cannot tell a fair complaint from an urgent safety report, and cannot answer "is the road shut tonight?" — which is most of the volume. A web form asks a frightened or furious person to type. None of them produce a register entry good enough to put in front of an assessor.
What closes it is a line built specifically for the scheme: answering every hour in the caller's language, stating only the facts the communications lead has approved, logging complaints word for word, escalating anything urgent to the duty team immediately, and handing the liaison officer a categorised register on Monday morning instead of a voicemail box.
Fair questions
Asked this month, answered straight.
Is pre-application consultation still required for an NSIP after 24 July 2026?
Not as a statutory duty. Sections 42, 43, 44, 45, 47 and 49 of the Planning Act 2008 were repealed in their entirety from 24 July 2026 by the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, with no transitional arrangements. That removes the statutory duty to consult, the Statement of Community Consultation and the Preliminary Environmental Information Report. Consultation is still expected — through non-statutory guidance under section 50 of the Planning Act 2008, and through the common law Gunning principles, which require consultation at a formative stage, with enough information to respond intelligently, adequate time, and genuine consideration of what comes back.
What replaced the Statement of Community Consultation?
Guidance rather than statute. The Secretary of State has a duty under section 50 of the Planning Act 2008 to publish guidance on the steps an applicant might take in preparing an application, and a suite of new and updated NSIP guidance was issued in early July 2026 ahead of the 24 July commencement. Because the standard is now guidance and common law rather than a prescribed document, practitioners have flagged the risk of inconsistent practice between projects and greater exposure to challenge at acceptance stage.
Does the repeal remove our community obligations during construction?
No. The repeal concerns pre-application consultation in the Development Consent Order regime. Construction-phase community liaison duties come from somewhere else entirely — planning conditions, Construction Environmental Management Plan commitments, DCO requirements, client contract requirements and scheme-specific obligations. None of those changed on 24 July 2026. If anything, with less prescribed at the front end, what a scheme can demonstrate during delivery carries more of the weight.
How do you evidence community engagement on a construction scheme?
With a single, date-stamped register of contacts rather than a narrative. Each entry should record the date and time, the channel, the caller or correspondent, the category of issue, what was raised in their own words, what they were told, what was promised, who owned it and whether it was closed out. Out-of-hours availability and acknowledgement times should be visible in the same record. Assurance reviews, Examining Authorities and Considerate Constructors assessors all read the record, not the intention.
How quickly should a construction scheme respond to a resident complaint?
The clearest published UK benchmark remains the HS2 Ltd Residents' Charter: acknowledge within 2 working days, and respond within a maximum of 20 working days where the query cannot be answered straight away. HS2 Ltd reported in February 2026 that of 1,067 complaints received between April and December 2025, 98% were resolved within 20 working days and 100% of urgent construction-related enquiries and complaints were responded to within 2 working days. No statute imposes those timescales on every scheme, but they are the numbers a comparison will be made against.
Is a 24-hour community helpline required on a UK construction scheme?
There is no single statutory rule requiring one on every scheme. HS2 Ltd commits to a freephone community helpline 24 hours a day, 365 days a year in its Residents' Charter and reports being supported by a 24/7 helpdesk. Community liaison and a complaints procedure are standard content in a Construction Environmental Management Plan, commonly required as a pre-commencement planning condition on major development, and on a Considerate Constructors registered site Community is one of three equally weighted assessed pillars under the Code and Checklist applying from 5 May 2026. Individual DCOs, contracts and client requirements may go further, so check your own.
Can an AI line produce evidence an assurance review will accept?
It produces the record; the scheme still owns the response. Every call generates a structured, timestamped entry — category, caller, location, what was asked, what was said, what was promised — written into the scheme's community liaison register, with urgent safety reports escalated to the duty team at the time of the call. That is auditable engagement evidence rather than recollection. It does not score anything by itself: assessment rests with the Examining Authority, the Scheme and the client.
Does the line tell callers it is AI?
Yes, plainly, whenever anyone asks. There is no attempt to pass as a person. On a public-facing channel on an infrastructure scheme, that honesty is the point — it also explains why somebody picked up at 2am.
Get in touch
If your scheme has a number on the hoarding, we should talk about what it produces.
Tell us the scheme, roughly how long it runs, who owns the public information, and what you can currently evidence. We will tell you honestly whether a line is worth it, and what it would take to get one signed off.