The Shropshire Outdoor Partnerships Service is the part of Shropshire Council that maintains and develops recreational access, conserves and enhances the natural environment and encourages people to improve their wellbeing by being active outdoors.

The Service maintains and protects Public Rights of Way, Country Parks, Countryside Heritage Sites, works with lots of volunteers and delivers health initiatives such as Walking for Health and the Wild Teams.

Working with local communities across Shropshire, our priorities are to:

• Conserve and enhance the natural environment
• Improve people’s health and wellbeing
• Support the local economy

Shropshire Council manages the following Country Parks and Heritage Sites plus 5,600km of footpaths and other Rights of Way:

To help focus our activity on priorities defined by people who use our services we undertake a user satisfaction survey. The survey focuses on Rights of Way and other access routes and the Country Parks and Heritage Sites managed by Shropshire Council, as shown on the map above.

This is an annual survey, so you may well have filled out last year… please do so again!

Please take the time to complete our short questionnaire by clicking on the 'How to get involved' tab and help us to develop and improve the service. If you take part in a number of activities that make use of facilities in different ways and for which you would give different responses, e.g. for walking with friends and riding, you can fill in this survey more than once.

Our budgets to do this work are under increasing pressure and your responses will help us to identify key areas for priority in the future.  The results will also help us to identify those less valued areas of the service which we could give a lower priority.

The survey should only take about 10 minutes of your time, depending on how much detail you give when answering the questions.

We'd like to hear from you, even if you don't use Shropshire Council's Rights of Way, parks, play areas or countryside sites so we can understand what the barriers to participation are.

Thank you for taking part.

If you have any comments about the survey please let us know: outdoor.recreation@shropshire.gov.uk

The results of last year’s survey and analysis of trends over a number of years is shown on our webpages - click on the link under the related information section to visit these.

The results helped shape the activity we did in this year.

• An estimated 952,000 people visited the Parks, Sites and Greenspaces, a 21% increase on the previous year
• 1,291 children on school visits (43% increase on previous year)
• Severn Valley Country Park Visitor Centre upgrade
• New office at The Mere- Community room for hire
• Over 1,500 improvements to RoW, Parks and Sites
• 170 stiles replaced by gates to make access to the countryside easier for those with limited mobility (10% increase on previous year)
• Shropshire Way Main Route development
• External funding secured for special projects
• 24% increase in income generation from 2015/16
• 21 improvements to the Definitive Map
• Responded to 455 planning applications
• Responded to 4602 Public Rights of Way Searches
• Successful ploughing and cropping campaign
• 1,177 volunteers, committing time equivalent to 21 full time staff
• 73 Parish Paths Partnership groups across the county, with five new ones in 2016/17
• Healthy Outdoors for Schools- successful pilot with two schools
• Over 1,800 people take part in Walking for Health, 30% joined this year and numbers are still growing
• 46 Wild Team volunteers
• 103,000 users of the Shropshire’s Great Outdoors website, 76% of whom were under 45
• 2,960 likes on Facebook and 2,258 Followers on Twitter
• New Shropshire’s Great Outdoors membership scheme launched Dec 2016
• LEADER- Southern Shropshire Local Action Group is the best performing in the West Midlands
• 8 new jobs have been created

If you have any comments about the survey please let us know using the contact information on this page.