Consultation
Walsall Council endeavours to consult with its residents and business users on major issues or policy changes wherever possible and we use a variety of mechanisms to seek your views. At the centre of our approach are the six Area Partnerships designed to enable services to be much more responsive to local needs. As well as the public, Area Partnerships bring together councillors and key public service providers such as the police, fire service, health, housing and the community and voluntary sector to solve local issues and encourage local people to play their part in helping the council and its partners to tackle the major issues that concern our residents. Each Area Partnership has a locally developed Community Area Plan which sets out the key priorities for that area.
Other ways that we use to obtain feedback include:
- surveys of the council’s 1,150 member Citizens’ Panel
- satisfaction surveys and other statutory surveys
- service based surveys, using service measurement techniques
- community involvement in planning processes including the Local Development Framework
- liaison with the community groups including the Walsall Disability Forum and other umbrella organisations
- one off focus groups and workshops
- service user panels
- equality impact assessments
- friends of local parks groups
- online surveys and polls via the council website
- school councils
- consultation with children and young people including Youth Opinions Unite (YOU)
- arts based activities
- Tell Us – the council’s comments, complaints and customer feedback procedure
- Other Informal customer feedback processes dealing with comments, complaints and customer feedback outside the Tell Us process
- Statutory complaints and customer feedback processes for social care services
Why consultation is important
Consultation is important because listening and responding to the public, as citizens and service users, is fundamental to our work and without it, we cannot be sure that our services are the right ones, nor that they meet the needs and expectations of local residents.
Benefits of consultation
Consultation can be used to:
- test options for service changes
- target services at what people want and need
- improve the delivery of services
- improve the take-up of services
- track overall resident and user satisfaction
- test public views on conflicting priorities, key choices and resource decisions
- support bids for resources i.e. Single Regeneration Budget (SRB)
- support the development and delivery of the community strategy and local strategic partnership
- support devolved systems of democratic accountability and services such as area committees and district offices
Need help?
Need help designing a questionnaire, running a focus group or analysing data and feeding back results contact us. Likewise if you want to find out more, get involved or have any ideas, comments or suggestions regarding consultation please get in touch, we want to hear from you!
Anna Sansom
Corporate Consultation & Feedback Officer
Civic Centre
Walsall Council
Darwall Street
Walsall
WS1 1TP
Telephone 01922 653520
Email surveys@walsall.gov.uk
This page was last updated on 03 January 2012