Gateway Reviews: from the perspective of a peer reviewer

Raymond Cheung from TfL is a peer reviewer, part of the Local Partnerships Gateway Review team. His honest and respected outside perspective gives us a unique view into the value of Gateway Reviews for Local Partnerships, our clients, and his own organisation alike.

How effective do you think a Gateway Review is at getting under the skin of a project and highlighting the key issues?

They are very effective, especially when it is coming from an outsider.

When working on a project, you might have been living inside an echo chamber. But as an outsider, we are especially not obliged to do that, and we can come in and look at the documentation and we can see, for example, health wise you guys are good, bad and ugly. Readiness wise you guys are good, bad and ugly, and so on and so forth.

As an external peer from a similar public sector organisation to the client, what value do you feel that you bring to the review?

I’ve made many mistakes in my life and I have operated in similar circles to our clients. I work for Transport for London, so I do very similar things. When I wear my Local Partnerships hat and go in and review those projects, I completely get where they’re coming from because I’ve been in their shoes, and still am in their shoes, of delivering projects.

I can still relate at a delivery level the challenges that the promoters come under, even though I do it for a different organisation. 

It takes some experience to do this kind of thing, but because of many mistakes that I’ve made in the past, I can say to you: don’t do this, do that, that may work or that may not. We bring with it that experience, especially to those who aren’t as experienced, to make sure that the end product becomes more credible, as it has been looked at externally and been suitably tempered and finesse.

What do you bring back into your own organisation from undertaking these reviews? 

The process that I’ve just described isn’t a one way street, it’s completely two way. It’s also about you coming into this process outside of your own work world to see if there are any good practises or issues that you’ve realised you haven’t done or are something you are going to encounter. This is a two way process, they learn from us as much as I learn from them. I hope the cross fertilisation keeps going and we can upskill everybody.

On a recent project I worked on a review for, the client came across an issue called nutrient neutrality. Being in the concrete jungle that we are in central London, we don’t come across this issue that much. However, we do come across it occasionally, and it is becoming an issue where you do projects in a suburban or even a rural environment where you are affecting the quality of soils. If I hadn’t been on that review panel for Gateway for Local Partnerships, I probably wouldn’t have come across this subject.

The Local Partnerships’ assurance offer

We have undertaken well over a hundred assurance reviews and can offer a range of hugely experienced reviewers across a range of sectors (transport, housing, energy etc).

If you would like to talk about how Local Partnerships and Gateway can support your project or just want to know more about our assurance offer then contact, Kevin Jones, link below.