Book a Plan Room Session

Service Description

Plan Room is for local authority plan-making teams working through a single problem that has become difficult. Sometimes the evidence will not resolve on its own, sometimes the decision is clear but its consequences are not, and sometimes the team simply cannot agree. The session is facilitated rather than directed. We are not there to tell you what to do, but we are not neutral chairs either. The point of bringing in someone who does this work is that they can tell you when an argument will not hold, so we will give you a view as well as running the discussion. The date you book here is the date of the session itself. Once you have booked, we will send a short form asking what the problem is, who will be in the room, what a useful outcome would look like, and what material we should read. We will then arrange a thirty minute call with your nominated lead to talk the form through and agree how the session should run. That call takes place at least two weeks before the session, and we will need your material within a few days of it, so that we have time to read the evidence, the drafting and the programme properly. Please only book a date that is more than two weeks away. The session runs for ninety minutes on Teams. It is a working discussion rather than a presentation, so we recommend no more than ten people, because any larger and it becomes a briefing. We ask the questions an inspector or an assessor would ask, we test the reasoning against what the evidence will actually support, and we say plainly where we think the position is weak. Afterwards we write it up. The note sets out what was covered, where the discussion got to, what we would do next, and what we would want to see before you commit to a course of action. Most teams use it as the basis for a decision or to brief senior management. The fee is £1,500 plus VAT and covers all of it: the form, the call, the session and the written note. It is the same whatever the size of your team. If you are not paying online, we will need a purchase order number before we start. You can cancel free of charge up to twenty-four hours before the first call. After that we will reschedule where we can, or charge the fee, because the preparation will already have been done.