The winner of a regional planning award has been announced.

St Cuthbert’s Garden Village in Carlisle has won the award for its online consultation service which includes an interactive exhibition.

The garden village was entered by Carlisle City Council for the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) Northwest awards for planning excellence.

The awards were hosted at the RTPI Northwest annual dinner in Manchester last Saturday (June 25).

Jane Meek, the council’s corporate director of economic development, received the award on behalf of the council.

It was nominated in two categories and was announced as the overall winner of the excellence in tech within planning practice category.

It will now be put forward to the national awards, to be held later this year.

Cllr Marilyn Bowman, portfolio holder for economy, enterprise and housing, said: “I’m delighted that the team’s work has been recognised at a regional level.

“It is very much a team effort, with colleagues from across the authority working together to support the delivery of this exciting and transformational project.”

An RTPI spokesperson said: “Carlisle City Council is preparing a local plan for St Cuthbert’s, and a strategic design SPD has recently been adopted to support it.

“The introduction of lockdowns and other Covid restrictions prospectively threatened momentum on both the local plan and the SPD, as it made engagement and consultation with the public and other interested parties so much more difficult.

“Rather than suspending plan production as some others did during 2020 into 2021, the city council decided to maintain progress, which meant investigating the potential to create a virtual public consultation exhibition and promotional video so that the whole process could be undertaken online.

“The city council turned to its small in-house communications team to look at the potential for them to assist.

“It transpired that one of the team had experience of developing video games and this skill set proved key to be key to the team being able to undertake the task.

“The judges were impressed with Carlisle’s determination to find in-house solutions so that Plan and SPD progress could be maintained, and to the way in which to a tight timetable the team stepped up and developed an interesting and usable virtual exhibition.

“The outcome is that progress on the local plan is maintained, and the SPD was able to move towards adoption.”

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