Public consultations for Improvement Schemes & Major Projects

Introduction

Highways England is the government-owned company charged with operating, maintaining and improving England's motorways and major A roads. Traverse has partnered with five different engineering consultancies (Amey, Arcadis, Cascade, Jacobs, Mott MacDonald/Sweco) to deliver public consultations at various stages of scheme design, as part of Highways England’s Development Consent Order (DCO) applications:

Consultation	Type of consultation	Partner
Lower Thames Crossing (2018 - 2019)	Statutory	Cascade
A47 Upgrades (two schemes in East Anglia) (2018)	Statutory	Mott MacDonald / Sweco
Trans-Pennine Upgrade (2017 and 2018)	Non-statutory and statutory	Arcadis
A2 Bean & Ebbsfleet Junction Improvements (2015-17)	Non-statutory	Arcadis
A428 Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet (2017)	Non-statutory	Jacobs
A47 Upgrades (six schemes across East Anglia) (2017)	Non-statutory	Amey
A12 Chelmsford to A120 widening scheme (2017)	Non-statutory	Jacobs

 

 

 

 

 

 

Methodology

Our role has been to support Highways England and various design teams to run DCO consultations that will meet both the Planning Inspectorate’s expectations in PINS Advice Note 14, and the Gunning Principles for best practice.

Design: a key element of consultation design on these projects, was providing advice on question wording and format, aiming to make them clear, unambiguous, unbiased and fit for purpose. Given the technical language and graphics often associated with highways improvements, we helped to ensure that the public were able to make an informed choice and input easily into the process.

Data management: across these projects, we processed all consultation responses from various sources, to import them into our custom-built analysis database. We drafted a Data Journey document, tailored to each project, to ensure the different teams from the various partners followed a systematic process to receive, process, data enter all responses, so these could be tracked, recorded and the process made auditable.

Analysis & reporting: we developed coding frameworks to rigorously analyse public and stakeholder views on the different proposals. These were designed specifically to uncover what respondents felt were the key issues and benefits. This approach meant that we were able to report on respondents’ views accurately and objectively, pulling out the key reasons for supporting or opposing certain proposals but also noting any suggestions for improvements.

Attention to detail and consistency are particularly vital in statutory consultation analysis. Our bespoke tool is designed to ensure that every word of every response is coded accurately. This is done through a combination of manual quality checks by our experienced staff and systematic data checks. As a result, our raw data reports helped our engineering partners identify the granular and location-specific concerns that are essential to identifying potential scheme design changes.

Stakeholders can also be easily tagged within our analysis tool. Through our live review website, raw data reports and summary reports, we are able to segment our analysis into statutory consultees, such as local authorities, persons with an interest in land and other respondents. Our partners have found this extremely useful to meet the requirements of the Planning Act to have account of respondents’ feedback by their statutory status.

Impact

Some of these highways improvements received a significant amount of attention from the public and stakeholders. Traverse’s consultation analysis reports have helped guide Highways England and their engineering partners on how best to proceed with their improvements in the face of controversy and complexity, while meeting all legal requirements of statutory and non-statutory consultations in preparing their DCO applications.