What is Accessibility Planning?

Accessibility planning seeks to address wide issues of social exclusion by directly tackling the problems facing people who find it difficult to access the goods, services or facilities they require.

Making the Connections (Social Exclusion Unit, 2003) defines social exclusion as something that happens when:

'People or places suffer from a series of problems such as unemployment, discrimination, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime, ill health and family breakdown. When such problems combine they can create a vicious cycle. Social exclusion can happen as a result of prblems that face one person in their life. But it can also start from birth. Being born into poverty or to parents with low skills still has a major influence on future life chances.'

The Prime Minister, in his foreward to Making the Connections, said that accessibility planning:

'Offers a new way to find and solve local problems, checking whether people experiencing socal exclusion can reach the services they need, and identifying action to take if they can't. Action could be through improving public transport, introducing more innovative travel options, or changing the location or delivery of the services people need'.

Accessibility planning requires a local transport authority - in association with its partners and stakeholders - to develop a practical strategy to implement changes which will improve accessibility. This involves a systematic approach to identifying and addressing the problems of poor accessibility. The interventions that form your action plan will include both transport-related and other types of actions.

LTA officers have told withinreach that the exciting thing about accessibility planning is that it is a structurd process that is both evidence-based and measurable. Plus, it involves considering how various essential services are provided, instead of only about transport to them.

From your professional point of view, accessibility planning introduices a particular way of working that is comprehensible and easy to use by everyone involved in local service sector planning and delivery.

Accessibility planning has grown from two things: the need for it and the technical ability to carry it out.

First, there came widespread acceptance that public resources should be targeted at the people who are most in need (SEU, 2003). This was a turnaround in policy thinking for transport. 'Need' had traditionally equalled 'demand'. That made 'need' something of a bulk commodity: if a lot of people need to cross a road, then a crossing should be provided; if a lot of people need to get from the same A to the same B, then a bus should be provided; if a lot of people live in an area, then a hospital should be built. There has, however, been a gradual shift towards the new assessment of need.

Pedestrian crossings are a case in point; they are now provided where people who would otherwise find it difficult to cross most need them - close to schools or to homes for elderly people, for example. Accessibility planning requires a focus on the severity of need, so that access is improved for people who are currently unable to reach education, health, work, shopping or social activities.

Secondly, the ability to hold, manipulate, and disseminate information has been transformed in recent years; much more can be done with data, far more easily and very much more cheaply. As a result, the traditional ways in which we have analysed problems and rationalised what to do about them have been transformed.

Across each of the different service sectors, front line delivery staff have much more information available to them about how they can deliver their services more effectively and efficiently. Above all, they can be much more objective in their approach to defining and resolving problems. What was once the province of the specialist analyst and statistcian is now within reach of those directly engaged in delivery in the local service sector.

Next - Accessibility Planning and North East Lincolnshire Council