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 nine Local Neighbourhood Partnerships (LNPs), each covering either two or three of our electoral wards. These bring together ward councillors, other public service providers, and local people and groups, and provide a forum for discussing, and shaping local service provision. Each LNP is supported by a framework of community based groups reflecting local issues and priorities.
Other ways that we use to obtain feedback include:
- surveys of the council’s 1,250 member Citizens’ Panel
- Best Value 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 empowerment network, disability forum and other umbrella organisations
- one off focus groups or workshops
- service user panels
- equality impact assessments
- friends of local parks groups
- 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
In the coming months we will be working on a number of projects that will help improve the quality of consultation we undertake, help us maximise the use of findings and enable us to share results with everyone more effectively.
Forthcoming projects include:
- a comprehensive consultation toolkit with information about how to carry out a consultation from start to finish;
- a consultation database and diary to help us, and our partners plan and share consultation information and results, and for the public to find out what consultation is being undertaken in the borough and the results and outcomes of consultations;
- the introduction of tools to facilitate online consultation.
We will keep you up to date with our progress via this website.
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!
Contact us
Anna Sansom
Corporate Consultation and Customer Feedback Officer
The Civic Centre
Darwall Street
Walsall
WS1 1TP
Telephone 01922 653520
Fax 01922 614210
Email sansomanna@walsall.gov.uk
This page was last updated on 19 June 2009