NSIPs Conference: Maximising positive outcomes for the local community.
By Paul Warmington.
Last week, I was delighted to be invited to speak at the NSIPs Conference – Good Practice for Local Authorities in Bury St Edmunds, alongside many other excellent speakers.
Throughout 2022 and 2023 Suffolk County Council has been host to an NSIPs Centre of Excellence for the East of England, funded by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC).
This conference was the culmination of a series of seminars for the East of England held over 2022/23 and included policy updates from DLUHC, good practice of engagement between Local Authorities and promoters and the section that I was contributing to: Maximising positive outcomes from NSIPs for local communities, where I was joined by Jamie Childs, Director at Howes Percival, who spoke from a legal perspective of maximising outcomes for communities and Dr Catrin Jones, Head of Stakeholder and Community Engagement at Vattenfall, who spoke of the lessons learnt from developing community benefit as a promoter.
I had been asked to discuss the topic of maximising the skills and employment benefits from hosting NSIPs. The approach I took delegates through, was to view this through four distinct activities:
Place – Define the opportunity.
Engagement – Collaborative work with the promoter.
Proportionality – No two NSIPs are the same.
Delivery – Moving from planning to doing.
By using these four activities as a guide, a local authority will be able to clearly define to a promoter what success looks like and importantly where the projects ambitions align with that of the locality, its long-term vision, and where the project can be a catalyst for positive growth. How understanding a promoter’s motivation, outside of working with the tools of planning, and fostering meaningful engagement is the next important step as more is always achieved in collaboration.
Proportionality is there to remind everyone that no two projects are the same and that as a local authority you must measure each project on its own merits to understand where and when it will contribute to your local growth ambitions.
Perhaps most importantly, I wanted to leave delegates with the message that the real work starts once the planning has concluded. Maintaining strong collaborative relationships with the promoter as personnel changes, the models you have been discussing through planning turn into actuals and new opportunities present themselves, is crucial to the flexibility and dynamism needed for ongoing work.
However, throughout all of this, there remains a simple truth: People still want and need sustainable jobs and careers and will want to feel secure in a location they call home. By maximising the opportunities that projects bring to a locality, these can and will be provided.
This was a really useful event with pertinent discussions from all speakers surrounding the themes of early engagement, correct resourcing and collaborative working between local authorities, local communities and the promoter.