From designing a clean recovery to a night time safety app – ADEPT celebrates success at annual awards
The Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning & Transport (ADEPT) President’s awards took place virtually today, celebrating the outstanding achievements of ADEPT members and partners across the country.
This year’s awards categories were: Delivering Clean Growth, Digital Innovation and Technology, and Shaping Places for People.
The Delivering Clean Growth category, sponsored by WSP, highlighted where councils have gone beyond traditional roles to promote clean growth. The winner was Kent County Council, for its Low Carbon Kent project, which attracted the judges for being a “…wide-ranging project, the number of people involved is amazing!” The project included piloting a Clean Growth programme to maximise the impact on real green recovery from Covid and to find innovative and viable business solutions to challenge the status quo of linear waste streams.
There were two highly commended projects. Plymouth City Council’s, Delivering charging infrastructure to electric passenger ferries, saw the council working with partners to create the infrastructure to support the UK’s first fully electric coastal passenger ferries. Leeds City Council’s £270m Connecting Leeds programme has invested in inclusive growth and low carbon transport to create transformational change into the future
The winner of the Digital Innovation and Technology category sponsored by Ringway was West Berkshire Council for the Thames Valley Berkshire Smart City Cluster. Entries were evaluated for showcasing digital innovation and innovative approaches across the sector that were sustainable, resilient, accessible and promoted wellbeing.
The Berkshire-wide collaborative smart city IoT project, incorporated a LoRaWAN communications network and created nine innovation challenges to addressed real service issues. These included Project Joy, which used a digital approach to tackling loneliness in the elderly and My Way, which involved trialling an app designed to aid safety for women at night. The judges liked their approach of using a co-ordinated agenda to get a better outcome through technology.
Norfolk County Council were highly commended for their project to use the UK’s largest LoRaWAN (IoT) network to support data-driven highways service delivery. Oxfordshire County Council’s DRIVEN project, which built and combined all parts required for autonomous vehicle fleets on public roads, was also highly commended.
The final category, Shaping Places for People, sponsored by SNC-Lavalin’s Atkins business, celebrated collaboration in the delivery of programmes and services that improved outcomes for people across the preventative health and social care agendas.
The winner was Nottinghamshire County Council for its Independent Travel Training Scheme to support students with learning difficulties, which impressed the judges for being, “a relatively small project that has a deep and lasting impact.” The project included helping students learn how to use a public phone and the Green Cross Code, and to practice using pedestrian and public transport skills. They also practiced showing visitors around their establishment,
Highly commended in this category were South Gloucestershire Council for their Celestine Centre, which alongside partners, Bromford Housing Group, made innovative use of a typical house to remove barriers to independent living. Somerset County Council were also highly commended for their Socially Distanced Social Value scheme, with partners Skanska, to find new ways to deliver social value in Somerset during the COVID-19 pandemic.
New ADEPT President, Paula Hewitt said: “I would like to commend everybody who entered this year. We had to put the 2020 Awards on hold due to the pandemic, so it is fantastic to see how local authorities have continued to innovate and deliver for their communities in extreme circumstances.
“Congratulations to the winners in each category, who have demonstrated how local authorities can work collaboratively with a wide array of partners across different sectors to transform their places.”
ADEPT is the voice of local authority county, unitary and metropolitan strategic place directors across England with responsibility for the key place based services, including transport, environment, planning, economic development, housing and waste.