Local authorities are responsible for managing rights of way on behalf of the public. We want people to enjoy and benefit from their rights of way, so we're always looking for ways to encourage best practice and challenge underperformance.
We're working with IPROW (the association of local authority rights-of-way professionals) and other user-groups to develop a set of indicators which will give a comparative measure of how local authorities perform on different aspects of rights of way management.
A 'mystery walker' scheme is likely to form part of the set of indicators - the general idea being to give willing volunteers a start point on a random right of way, invite them to do a circular walk from that point, and ask them to tell us about the experience.
The next step is to trial the indicators; watch this space for more information and to find out how you can get involved.
Rights of way performance was formerly assessed by the Audit Commission's Best Value Performance Indicator (BVPI) 178. The last available statistics for BVPI 178, which was abolished in April 2008, can be downloaded here.
Contact Adrian Morris for more information about this work.
