This Best Practice Guide to Community Consultation and Engagement comprehensively defines the necessary standards and processes that as part of designing and delivering active travel schemes. It is probably more pitched at improving the techniques of transport planners than refining the approaches of experienced community engagement professionals.
Stakeholder groups
The guide defines stakeholder groups who should be engaged in the process, though does so partially in a vacuum. It does not, for example, recognise that engagement could be organised through town councils, resident groups, voluntary sector forums or business groups such as BIDs, who already have strong relations with stakeholders. The key stakeholder groups identified are:
- Residents: People who live in the area that you are delivering a scheme in are a key part of the project and one of the main audiences for community engagement.
- Businesses: This is another stakeholder group who can play a central role in the development and implementation of an active travel scheme.
- Local groups: Such groups, representing local people or specific interests, can be helpful to involve in the engagement process.
- Road user groups: These groups can provide access to expertise on subjects or localities and a specialist perspective, though they can sometimes unintentionally misrepresent views.
- Statutory consultees: These are organisations and individuals that must be consulted as part of any statutory consultation process
Stages of engagement and design
The guide sets-out a number of stages in the design and delivery of active travel schemes and provides clear guidance on the role of engagement and communications for each. There is a sense though, that the process is largely about refining the design of a scheme that is programmed to go-ahead, rather than taking things back a stage to understand the wider needs of the town centre or neighbourhood in question.
A baseline stage is defined as “before” and it is explained that this is about understanding the existing situation, gathering project data, and preparing for project development and delivery. The guidance does though go onto explain that the baseline is the stage to begin to communicate the reasons for a proposal for change and that this includes the important message that the status quo isn’t working or needs to change to accommodate something new.
Whilst good for defining expected standards in community consultation and engagement, our concern is that this guide is too narrowly focused on refining schemes after they have broadly been given the go-ahead. The risk in doing so is that key stakeholders such as businesses, may develop unnecessarily entrenched position from the outset. Similarly, schemes may be delivered that do not show an awareness of the wider context such as other pressing community needs or design issues.
