Our Approach:

Social Atlas is currently providing expert regionally- based consultants to work as embedded Place Mangers for the project, serving as key contact points for landowners, near neighbours and community action groups, and providing strategic advice and support to ensure landowner and community needs are heard and met.

Place Managers work to understand the fabric of the community, its conflicts, tensions, and varying perspectives, to act as an independent and ongoing point of contact for affected landowners during project refinement and throughout the property acquisition process.

Early engagement focused on understanding landowners' perspectives about the project and developing a robust constraints mapping process. Through this process, Place Managers worked with landowners to identify, understand and visually represent property-specific opportunities, constraints and concerns, highlighting areas of overlap and potential conflict to support more informed project decision making and design refinement.

As the project progresses, the role of the Place Managers will evolve to support landowners through the acquisition process. Unlike Acquisition Managers, who focus on the technical, legal and procedural aspects of acquisition, Place Managers provide additional personalised support tailored to individual circumstances. Their role is to ensure landowners have a clear, accessible and trusted point of contact from the earliest stages of engagement, helping them navigate project information, understand available processes and services, and communicate their concerns and priorities throughout the project lifecycle.

Our locally based team are sensitive to the impact that the layers of engagement have on communities already concerned about the impact of the energy transition. They are responsible for representing EnergyCo in the region of the project and for establishing and maintaining positive relationships with both landowners and the community that build support and acceptance and help to facilitate project delivery.

Operating within the wider Property team they work closely with the Community and Stakeholder Engagement team and interface with other specialist project teams, to facilitate information flow, identify any potential landowner issues and to develop coordinated and prompt responses to minimise and mitigate risks to project delivery.

The Place Managers also regularly attend a range of community events, including information pop ups and rural and regional shows, sharing information, and helping to translate the technical complexity of the project to ensure landowners and other stakeholders can make more informed decisions.

Most recently our team have also been supporting the Port to REZ investigations, which consider the most suitable low-impact route for vehicles transporting over-sized equipment from the Port of Newcastle to the NE REZ. Place Mangers are working closely with landowners and communities along the proposed corridor to understand emerging concerns and ensure early issues are captured before formal acquisition activities commence. This work is critical to identifying localised constraints, facilitating early conversations about potential impacts, and ensuring that insights from landowners feed directly into route refinement and technical assessments.