Customer story: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, UK

Traffic Regulation Order (TRO) consultations

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) is, by geographic area, one of the smallest boroughs in London – and yet it's the most densely-populated local authority in the entirety of England and Wales. Unsurprisingly, this creates heavy traffic, requiring careful management.

With space at a premium, parking is an emotive issue in central London. RBKC is no exception. Any changes to parking arrangements, resident permit schemes or other forms of Traffic Regulation Order (TRO) can spark heated debate – and may often attract intense public scrutiny.

Public engagement on contentious matters

As a result, public engagement around traffic and parking issues is crucially important for RBKC. Every year, the Council runs dozens of parking and TRO consultations with residents – sharing their proposals, giving people a chance to understand the planned changes and to provide feedback in a managed context.

With these frequent, high-profile consultations to manage, and against a backdrop of national lockdowns (rendering in-person events impossible), RBKC adopted Citizen Space to run all their public engagement activity online.

Dedicated traffic section to increase visibility

One feature that RBKC have been quick to make use of is Citizen Space's configurable hub. This allows the council to modify the layout of their consultation site's front page:

• setting 'featured' consultations
• using eye-catching banners/graphical headers to make some activities more prominent
• creating dedicated sections to highlight key themes

Given the importance of TROs and other traffic and transport consultations to residents of Kensington and Chelsea, RBKC created a dedicated 'traffic consultation' section on their Citizen Space hub. This means potential respondents can easily find all opportunities to have their say on these topics, without having to use the search or filter options.

Single system, transparent process

RBKC are now able to manage, run and publish all their consultations – including on TROs and transport – in a central, standardised, online system. Not only does this make life more straightforward for staff; it makes it easier for the public to find, understand and give input on parking proposals, too. It also gives RBKC a clear, convenient way to close the feedback loop with respondents – through Citizen Space's 'We Asked, You Said, We Did' feature, the Council can report back to residents, giving transparency on the process and reasoning by which decisions were reached.