Local Access Forum National Conference 2013: “Sharing Good Practice – Sharing Solutions”
After the good feedback received following the 2 LAF conferences held last year in Newcastle and Bristol, another national LAF conference was arranged for this year and was held on 27th February 2013 at the Holiday Inn Royal Victoria hotel in Sheffield.
All LAFs were asked to nominate a representative to attend the conference (in addition to members running workshops) and in the end 99 LAF members attended representing 72 different LAFs from across the country (88% of the total active LAFs).
The theme of the conference was ‘Sharing good practice: sharing solutions’ and focussed primarily on LAFs sharing their ideas and knowledge with other LAFs from around the country. So although 2 of the talks and a couple of the workshops were run by Natural England and Defra, the bulk of the conference comprised of workshops and a talk arranged and lead by LAF members. Support for these was given by the LAF Regional Coordinators and Natural England staff attended each workshop to take notes and actions.
Not surprisingly, the conference has generated a wealth of information and feedback. You can find all this information here on the website. There were plenty of suggested actions for Natural England and others to pursue. Over the coming weeks we’ll look at this in more detail and will produce a report that outlines how some of the issues raised at the conference might be taken forward.
So thank you to all who helped to make such a successful conference. To the delegates for their positive contributions to the day; the LAF members who ran workshops; the Regional Coordinators who put so much into pulling the event together; the speakers: Sue Coles, Stephen Herbert (Natural England), Jonathan Tweney (Defra) and finally Steve Scoffin who did a great job as Chair of the event. We couldn’t have done it without you!
For more details about the conference, please click the links below: