News & Insights
The challenge of engaging on long-term infrastructure projects
Today the Institute publishes a short video taken at a recent drop-in centre event at Sandy – on the proposed route for the East-West rail route.
The East-West what…? Good question, for it is probably a reasonable guess that many will never have heard about the scheme. Yet it has been on the drawing board for years and is now at the stage where route options are being shown to the public. It will be several more years before detailed planning consents are obtained, but for now a debate rages in this community as to whether the existing station will be retained, or replaced by a brand new interchange a few miles to the north.
Project promoters like this face a challenge – raising the right kind of awareness, encouraging constructive engagement and creating a climate of listening to residents and other stakeholders. That is quite difficult. Apart from a very few, people are not engineers or accountants or transport economists. They know what transport services they want. They know their own communities, and they care about the environment. There are a myriad questions; if you tried to publish an FAQ chapter, it would be a very, very long one.
So, this video shows how best practice project promoters use Drop-in Centres to enable hundreds of local residents to learn more about the project and ask all their questions. As Hannah Staunton explains in the video, it takes a lot of resource but generates a large amount of useful data. What it cannot do is eliminate opposition. If feelings run high and if local communities perceive these events as a glorified PR exercise, they will merely fuel resentment and even act as a lightning rod for protest.
It therefore needs skill and local knowledge to plan and deliver a programme of drop-in events like this successfully. Infrastructure projects that are welcomed by society at large often inconvenience or disrupt the lives of a minority, so those responsible for our roads, our railways, our airports and our energy supplies all need to learn and deploy the skills of best practice public engagement and consultation.