Focus of work
Transform Scotland is Scotland’s alliance for sustainable transport, bringing together individuals, communities and organisations who care about fairer and greener Scottish transport. In 2017, FIT funded its campaign “Transport Scotland’s Transport”, which aimed to inform and influence the Scottish Government’s ongoing National Transport Strategy Review (NTS2) and forthcoming Transport Bill and Strategic Transport Projects Review (STPR2). As part of this campaign, Transform Scotland did the following:
- Created campaign identity and supporting materials: #Transform20
- Collected people’s ideas on transforming transport in Scotland.
- Built alliances and coordinated the activities of national active travel organisations.
- Published report on the Transport Bill and held related meetings with transport spokespeople from the four main political opposition parties (Labour, the Greens, Liberal Democrats and Conservatives) and with the Transport Convenors (representing SNP) for Edinburgh and Glasgow.
- Contributed to formal government consultation process.
Impact
The #Transform20 campaign identity to collect people’s ideas on how to transform transport in Scotland was well received: the campaign aimed for 30-50 entries but received 63. The final 20 projects selected included a range of measures, from walking, cycling, bus, rail and ferry policy, to cross-cutting issues such as ticketing and fares.
Transform Scotland’s report, Getting the Bill Right, received excellent coverage across TV, radio and print media. Transform Scotland was the main Scottish news item on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland (breakfast news show), appearing live on the show; the report was also the subject of follow-up debates later in the show and on following programmes. It was also the headline article on the BBC Scotland News website over the course of the day. Transform Scotland received TV coverage on both BBC Scotland News, STV News and Scotland Tonight (STV’s nighttime politics show), as well as coverage in The Scotsman and The Times newspapers. The report was recognised by the Scottish Government, who deemed it “useful” in their media response. It was also widely circulated on social media.
As part of the project, Transform Scotland led advocacy work for the inclusion of Private Non-Residential Parking Levy powers, including presenting oral evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s transport committee. As a consequence of Transform Scotland’s advocacy work, the powers for Scottish Local Authorities to implement Workplace Parking Levy schemes were then included in what became the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019.