When might it be appropriate to gather more information?

You may already have a good picture of the situation based on the analysis of existing data and the collective view of the stakeholders who have been involved in defining problems and priorities.

Stakeholders will often be able to speak with some confidence on behalf of the community in an area or its specific subgroups. It could be, therefore, that the stakeholders you’ve been working with may well have helped you to develop proposed solutions to the problems and priorities. However, there are times when you’ll decide you need to know more, such as:

• The partnership agrees that the available data is accurate, but it’s failing to answer questions you have about the nature of the problem, its severity or the appropriateness of a candidate solution. It could be that the data doesn’t address topics of importance (such as cost or personal security, or address potential concerns of particular sectors of the community, etc) or that the information is too coarse to allow detailed understanding of situations on the ground


• There’s a disagreement among members of the partnership that, despite your best efforts, you’re unable to resolve through mediation. If members are disagreeing about the facts of the situation or the appropriateness of a proposed solution, it could be that the available data or result of any modelling is insufficient to answer the questions and further research is needed


• You decide that you need to know more in order to understand the relative importance of transport in a situation of social exclusion. This is important because there’s no benefit to introducing transport improvements alone in an effort to solve an identified social problem only to find that other barriers (such as low income or educational attainment) are crucial in understanding and resolving the problem

You should see the collection of additional information as an irregular task. Most of the time, readily available data and the collected views of stakeholders should be enough to assure you that your understanding of the situations is correct.

Surveys¹ and consultations would normally be one-offs with well-defined aims and outputs that successfully resolve an identified question or disagreement. Typically, they’ll focus on small geographic areas. It’s difficult to manage or interpret large-scale surveys and consultation if a single answer is sought (not to mention time and resource-intensive), so it’s important to be as targeted as possible.

¹ The term ‘surveys’ here should be seen as distinct from the collection of data to enable a baseline measure (as described in Chapter 5), a task which may need to be repeated if data is required which is not routinely collected.

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