COUNTRYSIDE AGENCY MAPPING ACCESS LAND PROJECT

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Information Management 2005 recognises excellence and innovation in the management of business information. This double award-winning project scooped best GIS Project award and the prestigious Premier Project award. Lise Taylor's work on the Mapping Access Land project for the Countryside Agency led to her winning the prestigious 'Project Manager of the Year' Award from the Association for Project Management. The project, also known as Mapping the 'Right to Roam', was a finalist in the hotly contested APM's Project of the Year section.

The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, (sometimes called the ‘Right to Roam’ Act) placed a duty on the Countryside Agency to prepare maps of all open country (mountain, moor, heath or down) and registered common land in England. This Countryside Agency project is the first where on-line consultation has been undertaken nationally in the UK. It involved close collaboration between our consultation, GIS and IT specialists and the client. It also required the successful delivery of new web mapping technologies.

The challenge

The Countryside Agency needed to make maps available for National public consultation whilst avoiding printing hundreds of thousands of paper maps on demand. In addition, the system would need to provide a full audit trail, allowing transparency and large degree of dynamic interaction in order to cope with the scale of the task.

Our solution

The project involved managing a complex process of mapping and public consultation, staggered across eight regions covering the whole of England. The solution places a geographic information system (GIS) at the heart of the project. Benefits include:

• Comprehensive Information on public access rights to the countryside.
• Engagement with stakeholders, including a statutory public consultation (e-enabled)
• Digital audit trail of all decisions making the process traceable and transparent
• Resultant mapping can be generated dynamically and viewed over the Internet.

Sue Cornwell Access Mapping Project Manager recently commented “The mapping process has been a challenging and exciting venture. Black & Veatch Consulting has proved willing and able to do what it takes to deliver, employing a partnership approach which has enabled us all to succeed with this landmark project”.

By the end of the consultation process we will have issued over 100,000 individual paper maps. These have been deposited with 414 local authorities, 163 individual libraries, and a total of almost 12,000 statutory consultees, including 10,000 parish councils. We organised 118 individual roadshow events, which attracted over 10,000 visitors to come and talk about the maps. The public consultation process resulted in almost 30,000 comments on the Draft Map and as a result almost 30% of the maps have been amended.

This is the first statutory, national consultation exercise carried out on the Internet. Since its launch in November 2001, the site has received nearly 35 million hits from 610,000 visits, and has generated over 3 million unique maps.

Roger Ward, acting head of access at the Countryside Agency, said: “To our knowledge this is the largest and most detailed mapping exercise of this nature anywhere in the world. Our three step approach to producing the most accurate maps possible allows us to constantly review the work we have done and to learn from it.”

More information on this project