How Three Rivers ran the consultation

In short: the good, the bad & the ugly

Our four-page easy-read sets out, in plain English, what went right and what went wrong:

• The good. The council gave more time than the minimum (eight weeks, not six), built its PDFs so screen readers can read them, and placed a public notice and press release on day one.
• The bad. The plan runs to more than 120,000 words at university reading level with no plain summary; commenters needed one form per policy; it opened in the school summer holidays with no extension; notification was opt-in; and the site boundaries could not be easily found from the documents.
• The ugly. The rules changed twice mid-consultation and were never explained; the council's own officers said the plan was "likely to be thrown out at examination"; the council's own consultation rulebook is five years overdue; and the "report back" it promises is still outstanding — due by the 30 November 2026 submission — and has not, as far as we can tell, been published for any earlier stage.

Read the easy-read (4 pages, PDF) →

The scorecard

Two of the eleven questions we tested were met, four partly, four not met, and one is not yet assessable.

The headlines

• The plan is very hard to read. Part II — the part that allocates the sites — reads at a post-graduate level, with sentences averaging 45 words. The two documents run to more than 120,000 words — about six times longer than a neighbouring council's whole plan — with no plain-English summary.
• It ran through the school summer holidays, with no extension. The consultation opened on 31 July, during the Hertfordshire summer holiday; its first five weeks fell inside it.
• One response per policy. A resident wanting to comment on the site, the green belt, the roads and the housing numbers must fill in four separate forms.
• Notification is opt-in. To be told about consultations, residents must email the council to join a database — the burden of being told falls on them.
• The site is hard to find. It carries three labels — H9, CFS26a and "The Kings Langley Estate" — with no coordinates or landmark description. We had to map it ourselves.
• Which rules apply is genuinely obscure. The 2012 Regulations were scrapped but kept alive; a new national policy framework landed mid-consultation; the "duty to co-operate" was abolished. None of it is explained to residents.
• The council's own consultation policy is out of date — and its promises unmet. Its review was due by June 2025; the "report back" its own policy promises is still outstanding for this consultation (the plan is not submitted until 30 November 2026) — and it has not, as far as we can tell, published one for any earlier stage.
• The council's own officers doubted the plan. Their report to Full Council warned the plan was "likely to be thrown out at examination", and the site was only included because it was directed in.

Said fairly

The council ran the consultation for eight weeks — more than the six-week minimum the Government directed. Its consultation PDFs are properly built for screen readers, which is good practice. And it placed a public notice and issued a press release on launch day. We report those because a fair audit says what went right.

And the plan itself

This briefing is about the process. The plan has its own problems — the council's own green belt review rated this land of "fundamental importance" before the Government directed it into the plan, and the plan secures no funded water, wastewater, school, health or transport capacity for 1,300 new homes. Those are set out, fully sourced, in The Abbots Road Report.

Read it in full