Page 9 - The Land Trust | Stakeholder Engagement

The Land Trust Working together to change lives for the better

The Land Trust at Upton - engaging with our customers

After ten years of managing green spaces such as country parks and However, our community based approach turned this situation “ Quite a lot of
nature reserves, in 2015 the Land Trust started exploring a new area of around. Our Estates team worked very hard to get a thriving residents management companies
business in the form of residential green space management, paid for group up and running, to give them a voice and allow them to play a won’t engage with you.
by the residents in the form of a service charge. key role in the future direction of the site’s management.
They’re not interested.
The Land Trust have taken a
We identified a real need for an organisation such as ourselves to take After a thorough consultation process, a joint decision was made
on the public open space within a development, add real value and between the Land Trust and the residents group to remove the very different approach to
manage it with fairness and the best interests of the residents at heart. incumbent contractor and tender for a replacement. The chair of the this in that they’re happy for
working group was part of the tender panel and represented the views us to engage with them.
We now have a number of these sites in various locations across the of the residents when it came to making the decision about which
country and we are delivering real social change with our communities. contractor to choose for the future management of the public open “ A new estate like this
space within their development. doesn’t have its own
The first of these sites we took on was in Upton, Northampton, in 2016 personality, you need to
and since then we have learned a lot of lessons along the way. Perhaps surprisingly, the residents, in collaboration with our
team, chose to appoint a more expensive contractor as the most develop its personality so
Taking on a site like Upton is never easy, particularly when you don’t important combined aspiration, was to provide a service that met the it becomes a place full
always know what residents have been told or the way in which expectations of the community. The estate is now in a much better of character. Slowly we’re
previous management companies may have managed the site. place with our management contributing significantly to the social doing that, and it’s with the
cohesion of the area. Land Trust’s help that we’re
Upton also came with its own unique challenges with SUDS achieving that.”
management a key part of the Land Trust’s work at the site and other What turned this situation around was our willingness to engage with
facilities such as lighting and the Fountain in the main square. On people, implement our learnings and come up with a solution that Nick Sturgess-Alex, Chair,
this particular estate, many of the residents were not happy with the worked best for all parties involved. Upton Meadows Resident’s Association
performance of the incumbent contractor.

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