Case Study
Leicestershire County Council Local Transport Plan Conference
SERVICES: CONFERENCE PREPARATION AND DELIVERY
Leicestershire County Council (LCC) are currently developing their new Local Transport Plan (LTP). Known as LTP4, this Plan will set out how the Council will provide a safe, connected, resilient and well-managed transport network across Leicestershire in the coming years. Crucially, the plan will also detail the role that transport can play in helping to achieve wider County Council goals such as facilitating economic growth, protecting the environment, and enabling health and wellbeing. Highlighting our local authority and transport planning sector experience, LCC approached SGS in Autumn 2023 to help them prepare and deliver a transport planning conference that would kick-start the development of the new Local Transport Plan.
What we did: preparation
We worked collaboratively with LCC using in-person meetings to shape and agree the objectives of the conference, which was intended to secure stakeholder views on what the transport network in the county needed to achieve over the coming 20 years, and how it could do this. We worked collaboratively with council officers to identify the stakeholders to be invited, mapping organisations against the objectives of the conference. This helped ensure we had a diverse range of local and national invitees across public and private sector organisations, infrastructure providers and community groups. To produce the conference invites, we worked with LCC to develop an introduction to the conference and what it was trying to achieve. This also included a section asking people to respond to four questions in advance of the conference. Feedback from attendees was then used to shape discussion topics that would be covered at the conference. Further work was done to develop an engaging and interactive conference agenda that would elicit the input from stakeholders LCC required to inform the development of the new Plan.
What we did: delivery
Held at the NSPCC Training Centre in Leicester on 30th November 2023, the Conference involved over 75 people from LCC partner and stakeholder organisations, all of whom took part in an interactive and engaging day that highlighted the desire amongst stakeholders to work together to improve the county’s transport network. SGS chaired the conference, penning and delivering an opening address whilst introducing keynote speakers across the day. We also hosted a question-and-answer session involving all conference attendees and facilitated the afternoon breakout sessions where interactive groups discussed ideas on potential interventions that could be delivered in the first five years of the Plan and fed these back to the rest of the conference. The conference agenda and our professional chairing of the event ensured an interactive and lively discussion across the day and that all attendees were given the opportunity to have their say. Following the conference, we inputted into the development of a Summary Report that captured the ideas, opportunities and concerns raised by attendees, identified the next steps that would be taken in the development of the new LTP, and collated lessons learned from the planning, organising and delivery of the event. Applying the diverse experience of our team, we were able to collaboratively prepare and deliver a conference that met the needs of LCC and the expectations of attendees. LCC are now consulting on their Draft LTP4 having used the conference input and feedback to shape a series of documents that make up the new Plan.
Andy Yeomanson, Team Manager, Transport Strategy & Policy, Leicestershire County Council:
“Steve's proactive approach to helping shape the conference content and approach, and his very good management and compering of the event on the day, ensured that the service provided by SGS exceeded our expectations.”
