What defines a successful land referencing team?

Land referencing experts are land rights and engagement specialists who combine specialist knowledge with commercial and strategic experience. A professionalised land referencing team’s principal role is to identify stakeholders, communities and organisations, and their legal interest and rights over land which is due to be developed, and to act as a consistent point of contact between those affected and the broader project delivery disciplines.

A land referencing team needs the right people, processes, tools, and experience to provide clients with technical excellence. Additionally, land referencers must engage in continuous professional development, help define best practice, and align with professional bodies. As geographers, they understand conceptual engineering and environmental designs and distil them to communities through real-world engagement.

Transparency

Our Mott MacDonald land referencing team deliver these services with full transparency to clients, stakeholders and affected parties. Having an open and accessible system to support the land referencing team’s processes with the client is vital. All information should be readily available to the client, ensuring they can monitor the project in real-time and suggest updates or changes. This supports:

·      Quality assurance

·      Governing and evidencing legal compliance

·      Data sharing to support design decisions and limit impact

·      Consistency and transparency of communication records

·      Surety of outcomes vs risk at a late stage

All stakeholders are then kept informed across the project lifecycle and their data is processed in compliance with good practices on information security, including GDPR.

Transparency provides the client with confidence and reassurance that what was promised will be delivered. Without an open system, there is an element of trust from the client to only deliver the final product. With a fully accessible system, the client can track and follow progress, view supporting documents and access internal data that would otherwise be unavailable. Transparency therefore fosters greater collaboration between all involved parties and assists with technical excellence and more successful delivery.

Collaboration

Land referencers need to interact and collaborate with project delivery teams and a variety of other internal and external clients. This includes independent land advisors and legal representatives such as land agents, solicitors, land valuers, geospatial and data managers, ecologists and design teams. Government organisations are also involved in delivering high-quality land ownership information too.

Working closely with the client is essential. Regular meetings discussing progress, issues, and deliverables help ensure everything is on track. Additionally, regular solution-based workshops with the client and adjacent disciplines encourages collaboration and innovation within the project team and introduces data driven value engineering. All of these help deliver better outcomes for affected parties.

Equally as important is strengthening relationships with the public to reduce stress, protect organisational reputation and increase customer satisfaction. It is essential to make the process and messaging as clear as possible for those stakeholders affected (many of whom may be customers of the client) by understanding how those affected would like to receive and digest communication. It is important to be as helpful as possible to impacted parties so they can easily access information and know how to get in contact if there are any queries.

Quality assurance

Having various levels of experienced staff working on a project is common and making sure the right person is doing the right role adds to client confidence. An organised system in which quality approvals must go through two people before going to the client helps provide assurance that a quality-driven process is being adhered to. Final approvers should only be experienced professionals to ensure deliverables meet predefined standards.

Having a track record of experienced land referencing team members seconding into client organisations also assures clients that we ‘know’ their product inside out from working within their organisations. This is also advantageous when the client organisations have a limited number of permanent staff and require flexible resourcing at key project milestones. Integration boosts quality assurance by improving the communication flow between the land referencing team and the client organisation.

Upskilling

Developing new skillsets for the future workforce is a great way to differentiate your land referencing team to retain skills and knowledge. Employees do not want to work in silos operating on only one task, instead they want the opportunity to gain broader experience and develop more holistically. Land referencers have specialisms within their teams, but it is important to give the opportunity to train employees across all aspects of a project and give clear direction for career progression and development.

Working in conjunction with the Society of Land Referencers (SoLR), the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), colleges and other organisations to develop apprenticeship schemes can help train a new generation of land referencing practitioners with on-the-job training, study to gain the right experience and skills, and developing supported routes to gain professional recognition and eventually chartership. On completion, apprentices will receive a qualification that is recognised by the Institute for Apprenticeships and will be more confidently progressing towards a land referencing career.

Innovation

Being empowered and willing to go beyond expectations is imperative, such as innovative solutions to solve client challenges that may not be within normal service scope. This may be looking at adding strategic services outside of land advisory. For example, legislation concerning habitat creation is continuously changing, so by understanding the client’s needs, there could be scope to expand services to offer additional environmental solutions.

Innovation can stem from secondments; a lot of the process improvement programmes within client organisations can derive from seconded staff as they are so integrated, they know how the client organisation works and can bring knowledge from site together with new and innovative solutions to their processes. For example, real-world knowledge can be underpinned with retained spatial data and shared at multi-disciplinary progress meetings to help streamline, improve processes and engagement.

Providing clients with futuristic based solutions through a digital solutions platform is essential to be in line with The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) ambitions for digitalising the compulsory purchase process. Traditionally land referencing was completed manually and through government databases. Through a digital platform, work can be streamlined and provide automated updates helping with efficient solutions to save time and money.

Overall, for a land referencing team to be lucrative, combining the right people, processes, tools, and experience is essential. However, it is also imperative to incorporate transparency, collaboration, quality assurance, upskilling and innovation to address future client problems in an ever-changing environment.