Conclusion
To reiterate the Executive Summary, the headline conclusion of this assessment report is that, subject to the ongoing agreement of Ministers, the People & Place delivery model is proving successful and should be continued over the next five-year parliamentary term, allowing it further time to establish and develop.
This report highlights strong evidence of continued positive impacts from individual sustainable and active travel behaviour change projects and initiatives, supporting the Scottish Government’s decision to increase national funding for this area of work. The report has also shown that there is good initial evidence that granting more regional and local control over the commissioning of these interventions has increased cross-portfolio value and impact from the ‘Support for Active and Sustainable Travel’ budget line.
This report demonstrates that while People & Place has enabled more joined-up working and greater alignment with local and regional strategies, there is still significant work to do for all of the organisations involved to adapt to new ways of working. Not least there is work for Transport Scotland to develop a proportionate portfolio management approach that supports more timely funding decisions, longer-term financial planning, minimises bureaucracy, promotes greater knowledge exchange, and enables more strategic evaluation.
Throughout the main sections of this report and its annex there are a number of more granular assessments that point to recommendations that will help drive this necessary improvement, whether that is building on existing strengths or addressing opportunities for development. For ease of reference a summary of 22 key assessments and recommendations has been provided in the following table:
| Ref. | Assessment | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | There is a question of whether the benefits of more localism and new partnerships will outweigh the disbenefits of differential services and additional bureaucracy. | Transport Scotland should further interrogate this issue through longer-term programme evaluation. |
| 02 | All stakeholders concurred in asking Transport Scotland to do what it can to streamline and standardise processes where possible. | Transport Scotland should continue to do this. |
| 03 | Evaluation confirmed the importance and impact of early intervention, school-based engagement, and community partnerships in fostering long-term behaviour change. | The programme should retain its thematic emphasis on 'Schools and Young People'. |
| 04 | Evaluation confirmed the effectiveness of workplace initiatives, but highlighted their relatively small scale and difficulties around assessment. | The programme should retain its thematic emphasis on 'Workplaces' and explore ways to strengthen engagement with employers. |
| 05 | Evaluation confirmed that targeted, inclusive interventions are the broadest category of work and significantly increase active travel participation and support wider policy goals. | The programme should retain its thematic emphasis on 'Accessibility and Inclusion'. |
| 06 | The overall scale and makeup of the workforce directly involved in delivering the People & Place programme has been difficult to determine. | Transport Scotland should ensure programme monitoring and future capacity and capability assessment captures a more detailed picture of the programme workforce. |
| 07 | RTPs took several different approaches to the 'capacity and capability' theme. | The programme should retain its thematic emphasis on 'Capacity and Capability', but support it with further metrics and guidance. |
| 08 | All parties could have benefitted from a longer lead-in time to prepare for the new devolved model of programme commissioning. | Transport Scotland should adopt an operational planning assumption that the new model will continue in this form over the next five-year parliamentary term. |
| 09 | Late budget confirmation from Scottish Government / Transport Scotland allows insufficient time for confident delivery planning. | Transport Scotland should continue to expedite funding decisions as quicky as possible, and explore ways of supporting longer-term financial planning. |
| 10 | The balance between available RDEL (~35%) and CDEL (~65%) sits at odds with the purpose of the programme. | Transport Scotland should continue to consider this factor in making resource spending allocation decisions. |
| 11 | Delivery complications arise from differences in what different organisations believe can and cannot be funded from capital budgets. | RTPs and local authorities should collectively discuss where they can take common approaches. |
| 12 | The RTP's processes of joined-up local prioritisation, informed by local strategies and plans, has helped to better coordinate different sources of funding. | Transport Scotland should continue to place confidence in RTPs as well-placed partners to strategically deploy active and sustainable travel resources. |
| 13 | The funding landscape still feels fragmented from the perspective of delivery partners on the ground. | Transport Scotland and the Scottish Government should work to align and connect complimentary funding. |
| 14 | Communication and engagement is key to the programme across the large number of interested parties involved, but resource is a limiting factor. | Transport Scotland should look for ways to bolster communication and engagement support, particularly for smaller RTPs. |
| 15 | The 'journeys by active travel' indicator furnishes the programme with its coherent policy goal and actionable theory of change. | The programme should retain this transport-based 'anchoring' indicator for transparency and governance. |
| 16 | All parties recognise the foundational role of transport indicators, but want to build on them for whole systems approach. | Transport Scotland should continue to support the development of evaluation based on wider benefits, social return on investment, and value for money. |
| 17 | Monitoring and evaluation activity under the new delivery model was widely seen as far too burdensome | Transport Scotland should place more emphasis on inferring national programme outcomes through monitoring rather than directly measuring individual project outcomes. |
| 18 | The pre and post intervention survey approach was counterproductive as a core programme-wide methodology. | Transport Scotland should strengthen autonomy and flexibility by allowing RTP and delivery partners to choose when and how to evaluate their own projects and regional programmes. |
| 19 | People & Place marks a shift from centrally commissioning programmes to managing a portfolio of investment in local government programmes. | Transport Scotland should continue to develop a more strategic 'portfolio management' approach to People & Place. |
| 20 | People & Place is an evolving and complex programme / portfolio delivering complex, place-based initiatives | Transport Scotland should adopt lessons from comparable programmes on flexible approaches to the types of evaluation that are feasible and appropriate at different points in time. |
| 21 | The programme's policy goal is broadly defined, only one element of a dynamic system, and has many possible solutions with outcomes that emerge over different time horizons. | The programme should continue to be developed collaboratively and support pluralistic and agile sets of means of achieving its policy goal. |
| 22 | The programme has supported longer-term transport strategy and planning work. | The programme should continue to support this as a means of underpinning long-term continuous improvement. |