ITP’s principles pay off in the transport planning business

Formed 20 years ago, consultant Integrated Transport Planning has grown rapidly over the last two years and now employs about 40 staff based in five UK offices. Andrew Forster spoke to chairman Colin Brader and managing director Jon Parker about the business

Colin Brader explains Integrated Transport Planning’s approach to consultancy. “We don’t see ourselves as a commercially-driven organisation, ever. I’m quite adamant that we shouldn’t be like that. We’re philosophically driven, we want to achieve things, and we’ve always managed to see the commercial side following and supporting that. We’ve been profitable every single year of our existence. During the recession we came down to a few per cent and we’ve never been super, super profitable because that’s not who we are.” 

Brader contrasts ITP’s position, employing about 40 staff, with that of bigger, listed consultancies. “In a big organisation you’ve got to follow the market more closely in relation to how you can make money, which gives a return to your shareholders. We don’t start with the need to make money, we start with trying to achieve some things philosophically. So we’ll have a debate about certain aspects of transport and say, ‘That genuinely interests us, we need to follow that and further it.’”

Brader quit consultant Atkins 20 years ago to set up ITP. He was having great experiences at Atkins but was “fearful that I’d be put into areas of work which didn’t agree with my philosophical approach”. That approach revolves around the importance of cities, the importance of good urban public transport to cities, and viewing transport from a user perspective. “I’m very interested in psychology – how that influences how we choose our transport, how we move around cities. The most excited I get now really in transport is when I hear psychologists talking about how people actually make choices.” 

In the early days ITP specialised in bus rapid transit projects – a topic for which Brader is internationally renowned. Today, the workload is a lot more varied, covering matters such as public transport, transport strategy, development planning, demand management, travel planning, active travel, car clubs, and the growing field of data visualisation. 

ITP has five offices, in Nottingham, Birmingham, Bristol, Milton Keynes, and London. Brader, 56, is the company chairman, having handed over the managing director’s position to Jon Parker two years ago. “It was my kind of belief, energy and philosophy that took the company to a certain size,” says Brader. “I just kind of said to Jon and the other directors, ‘I kind of think it needs someone else to lead this really, maybe I’ve played all my cards.’” Brader nevertheless remains as active as ever in the company. 

Parker, 47, had been a colleague of Brader’s at Atkins and joined ITP in its first year, becoming a director in 2003. “My interests lie in more sustainable places and that’s taken me into research around smarter choices, sustainable transport provision, walking, cycling, car sharing, car clubs,” he explains.

ITP’s turnover this year will be around £3.5m, says Parker. The company’s business is spread across three sectors: UK public sector, UK private sector, and international. The aim is for turnover to be split roughly equally between them, though it can vary each year. International work currently accounts for about 40 per cent.

The company has undergone rapid growth in recent months – staff numbers were about 25 two years ago. Says Parker: “That was a conscious decision we all took, it wasn’t about me taking on the managing director’s role, it was about the board saying, ‘actually now let’s all get behind this and start another period of growth.’”

Brader explains the type of person that ITP recruits. “We try to gather round a group of people who are driven by an interest in transport, not just ‘it’s a job’. They’ve got to be really interested in transport and delivering some kind of change in society.” 

The company has good staff retention rates, something Brader puts down partly to the culture of the organisation. “You ask about the difference from working with a big company – well, we’ve got some staff who recently joined us from a big company in Birmingham and they sort of said they’ve never met the senior directors of their organisation and didn’t really know what their senior directors thought or felt. They’re now sat opposite me and they just kind of love the fact, I’ll just say something to the air or whatever about our board meeting and they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting’. They get to know stuff, they know and feel part of the organisation. All our directors sit amongst staff, we’d never have separate offices.” 

All of ITP’s directors get involved in project work. “At least 60 per cent of our time as directors is spent in projects, sometimes more,” says Brader. He thinks this is vital. “There’s a lot of transport expertise around in consultancies but a significant proportion of that expertise is allocated to growing business rather than solving transport problems. I’m kind of thinking that transport professionals need to be solving transport problems, so I would say people who have got transport expertise within our organisation need to be in projects, they need to be working with younger staff, they need to be developing their ideas.”

Every five years the whole company goes on an overseas trip for three days, which serves as a study trip and an opportunity to discuss the direction of the business. This year’s trip has just taken place, to Utrecht in the Netherlands. “We spend a whole day debating the company,” says Brader. “So we try to understand what people like and don’t like and then we do this ‘corporate strategy by individual ambition’ technique where we sit down and say, ‘Ok, you’ve told us all those different things, how do we make sure that you can do what you want to do, is it by going into this part of the market, or whatever?’”

Says Parker: “It’s a very inclusive business in that respect, we take a lot of time to work with all the members of staff, understanding their interests and needs and moulding the business around that.”

ITP-is beginning to sound like a big family.

“Yeah, unkind people say it’s a cult,” quips Brader. 

UK operations 

ITP’s office locations heavily influence where it wins work. “Naturally the dominance of our offices in the Midlands, from Nottingham down to Bristol, means that that’s the area where we tend to undertake most of our UK projects,” says Parker. Brader and Parker are both Midlanders – Brader having grown up in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, and Parker in Wolverhampton.

“The offices are where they are because of people really,” says Brader. “It hasn’t been a commercial decision that we think ‘Oh, we think we’re going to increase our turnover by X if we have a Bristol office’; it’s because in every office’s case we’ve got a person who really wants to join us or wants to move within us to a certain location because of their domestic arrangements or whatever.”

“I think we’ve pretty much worked everywhere across the UK,” says Parker. “We’ve done work in Manchester and the North East – we do projects there right now but it’s where those projects demand some very specialist expertise, for example some advanced accessibility planning work where we believe we bring some insights that are a little bit unique into the market, or it’s because some of our partners in larger consultancies who are based in those places need some extra support and assistance to help them deliver projects.”

Parker gives a flavour of recent and ongoing UK public sector projects: the understanding and managing congestion study for Transport for London; a parking study for London Councils; travel demand management work for constructing the new Hinkley Point nuclear power station in Somerset; studying the impact of HS2, motorway and rail construction works on transport networks in the West Midlands conurbation; and undertaking local connectivity work for the proposed East Midlands HS2 station at Toton, in a SYSTRA-led project. 

The company conducts considerable work on local plans. “We get involved in local plan reviews where we might be advising on what’s the best place to locate development based on its ability to capture more trips on public transport and by walk and cycle,” explains Parker. “That may get taken all the way through the local plan process to adoption where we’re providing advice and support in order to be able to defend the position, rationale and reason for why those places were allocated.”

ITP sees spatial planning from both sides of the table – a number of its private sector clients are in the development sector. “We work for a whole series of out-of-town shopping centres, which, as you know, are traditionally seen as car-dominated places,” explains Brader. “But when you actually look at those, any commercial expansion for the owner is going to come from increasing accessibility, which usually means improving bus networks, improving light rail if it’s appropriate to that area, and cycling and walking. [It’s] sometimes about making that centre feel more attached to its surrounding area, so it becomes more of a city centre than an out-of-town centre.”

ITP has also developed a specialism in advising holiday parks. Says Parker: “Sometimes it’s around development planning and improving access and sometimes it’s about how do you change the culture of the park itself in order to create a more sustainable place, what kind of facilities are required around bike hire, internal trails, routes and tracks that start to make people think about their travel during the course of their holiday experience.”

An area of increasing interest is data analytics. “We’ll take model output and do visualisation,” says Brader.  “Straight away people can relate to it.” ITP has developed visualisation tools for accessibility planning, which have  been used in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. It is currently developing a regional visualisation tool for the eastern fringes of Europe in a World Bank project. 

Parker was lead author of the Making personal travel planning work report published by the Government in 2007 and personal travel planning continues to be an area in which ITP wins work. “We’ve been brought into projects either by clients themselves or by major consultancies to help steer those projects, either in an independent expert advisory role or, importantly, in an independent evaluation role,” says Parker. “So they [the other consultant] will still be leading the frontline delivery of the project but they’ve got the assurance of having individuals within their team that have really delved deeply into the mechanics of how those kinds of project work.

“That works really well for us because we can take a project and dissect it and see how that worked and we can learn a bit from it and better our knowledge base and then advise them on what they might do differently going forward. It creates an environment where you can share openly with a much bigger organisation without feeling like you’re giving away the crown jewels in terms of the knowledge and insight you hold. That kind of relationship works really well for us in lots of different areas.”

Much of the public sector work is won through frameworks – ITP is on a number of them, including the ESPO (Eastern Shires Purchasing Organisation) transport planning framework commissioned by Leicestershire County Council, frameworks in the West Midlands and the South West, and six frameworks with Transport for London.  

Brader says the company works happily in partnership with other consultants. “We can work comfortably with lots of bigger organisations and they feel pretty comfortable working with us.” Does ITP have favourites? Not really, he says, it comes down to the individuals you’re working with. 

ITP also partners regularly with the University of West of England’s Centre for Transport and Society. Parker is a  visiting research fellow there and Brader says the Centre and ITP share the same philosophical outlook. “We’ve invited some of their staff to give talks to our staff as well,” he says. “They’re serious researchers but they understand the practical applications of research.”

Do ITP’s principles ever stop it bidding for work? For instance, would ITP work on a development project that was heavily car-based? “We have had development clients who have decided we’re not right for them because we don’t toe that line,” says Brader. “We’ve kind of said, ‘Well actually, what you’re saying you want isn’t appropriate’ and we’ve actually stopped working with clients because of that reason, so our principles are very dear to us.”

Says Parker: “It’s not to say that we’re blinded to the need to provide facilities for the car but it’s about seeing it as a mode that functions alongside all the other options, rather than dominating.”

What about ‘Garden Towns’ – critics say some of the proposals are in the wrong location from a transport perspective, and will reinforce car-based lifestyles. Would ITP  refuse to work on such projects, or try to make them better places? “I think we’d take it on a case-by-case basis,” says Parker. “I think we’d always look to improve on what’s there. We’re also pragmatic that the land-use process is dominated by lots of complex decisions around land availability. We accept that; that’s the world we live in. We would have a view on what makes a more sustainable place and a less sustainable place but certainly if there’s an opportunity to be working on a large-scale on influencing behaviour and opportunities for people in this new community then we’d like to be part of that team.”

International activities

During the UK recession, ITP’s international work accounted for more than 50 per cent of turnover. Today it is about 40 per cent. “What we never do as a company is ask someone to go and work overseas if it wasn’t what they really wanted to do,” says Parker. “I’ve never done any international work, it’s not my bag.”

ITP’s first overseas venture came in the early 2000s, looking at improving public transport in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Brader explains how it arose. “Elsie Owusu, who’s standing for president of RIBA [the Royal Institute of British Architects] this year, is Ghanaian and she was helping the president of Ghana develop some kind of improved public transport in Accra. She got in touch with several operators in the UK saying, ‘Look, there’s a market out there and I would like you to be involved.’ One of those was Stagecoach who said, ‘Well, we work with this consultancy who know a little bit about public transport development, you should talk to them.’”

The World Bank subsequently commissioned ITP to undertake a feasibility study into bus rapid transit (BRT) for the city. A World Bank study of a BRT route for Lagos, Nigeria, quickly followed. Brader recalls that project fondly, describing how the route went from conception to delivery in 18 months. “That’s an amazing experience for a transport planner. It won us a lot of plaudits internationally in the donor banks and things and really was a springboard for doing lots of international work.” 

ITP’s international clients are primarily donor banks. “So the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Africa Development Bank, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development – big international organisations that look to facilitate the improvements of local conditions, though we have worked with some private sector companies as well,” says Brader.  

“For most of this work we lead [the bid]. We always work with a local partner, we tend to work with local universities for many reasons, one is they’ve got a good philosophical approach, i.e. they’re not highly commercial, and they’ve got access to lots of people if you want to conduct data collection. There’s a legacy issue as well because any work we do [is] with university lecturers, and they develop their skill base.”

Future directions

Has ITP ever been a takeover target? “Throughout our history I suppose we’ve been approached by various people,” says Brader. “Never tempted. About six years ago we looked at things like succession, we looked at things like our philosophy, how much we believe in it, and we kind of thought, what we want to leave is some sort of legacy. So we started to create the employee benefit trust – we started converting individual shares into an employee benefit trust, so eventually the idea is that the company would be owned by the employees.”

Brader is currently ITP’s main shareholder (other directors also have shares), and the trust has 20 per cent. 

Will the company continue to grow?

“We will grow but we haven’t got a commercial decision which says, ‘We need a Leeds office’,” says Brader. “But if we found somebody who we really get on with very, very well, and it has to be personal as well as professional, or somebody who says, ‘I really want to join you’ and they happen to be based in Leeds, that will be the reason for it.”

Parker sounds a note of caution about how large the consultant can become. “We’ve got some issues as a company to deal with if we grow much bigger, about how we continue to maintain that directors’ involvement in all of our projects. That’s an important principle to us and we don’t want to lose that. Making that work with a bigger pool of people starts to become a challenge.”

Brader is proud of what the company has achieved over two decades. “The best thing for me is knowing there’s room out there for a company who believes in what they do, rather than something that just goes and chases money.”