Resident engagement: a powerful catalyst for financial change

Steve Bishop is Strategic Director for South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse District Councils

One of the councils I work for, Vale of White Horse, has been dealing with cuts and tough budgeting decisions for what seems like a very long time. As part of that process we decided to go to the public five years ago – as many councils are still doing – and ask them how they would manage the council’s finances and what choices they would make, given the cuts we were faced with.

To do this effectively we invested in the SIMALTO software which enabled us to reach out to the public and survey them in a way that produced some quite unexpected and powerful results. The process involved fairly in depth doorstep interviews lasting over an hour, carried out by market research people who were able to capture a sophisticated set of data from each participant and feed it back to us to plug into the software. It’s not a cheap process but I’d argue it’s an effective one.

It was this qualitative methodology for collecting data that made the difference in my opinion and the usefulness of the results was routed in making sure residents understood the choices they were being asked to make. We gave each of them credits (instead of pounds) to spend on a list of local services and enabled them to see what they could effectively buy with a finite supply of credits.

You could opt for weekly waste disposal if that’s what you really valued as long as you were willing to cut elsewhere – grants, for example. Or, you could decide to increase your number of credits (by raising council tax) and afford a greater basket of services.

So you send people shopping (and who doesn’t love shopping?) and you say here’s your budget, what do you value? You can have more credits if you want but they have to come from somewhere and that somewhere in this case is council tax.

You need to get a statistically representative sample of people to take part in the survey so that you can then extrapolate some assumptions about how the general public would spend the local authority budget. That lets you see the areas that nobody is interested in where you might be spending money unnecessarily and other areas which everyone values where you could make some popular improvements.

The most unexpected result, typically, is that when you put some variation of council tax scenarios into the survey, so you offer more credits for buying services in exchange for a raise in council tax, most people will opt to raise their council tax. If you walk up to 100 people in the street and say ‘ should we raise council tax’, a 100 will most likely say no but if you ask them how they would personally allocate resource, in a sophisticated way, you start to get buy-in.

The final statistics that come back from the collated data go off to the councillors and they’re able to see an accurate ranking of services by their residents. From that you can start making decisions about what impact different cuts would have on resident satisfaction.

An important part of the process is to ask councillors how they would implement cuts, before you survey the public, so that you can see the difference in the two sets of results. In our experience the results were vastly different between the two groups and so for councillors, the ability to assess the public mood and revise their own assumptions about where to make cuts was highly educational, not to mention politically beneficial.

Another important aspect is quantifying the impact on customer (dis)satisfaction of each service change so that the (un-)popularity of any basket of service cuts/improvements can be estimated. This helps councillors refine their budget changes to minimise adverse public reaction.

Arguably, if you ever wanted to spend £100k (or whatever it is) on having a council tax referendum because you felt you needed to raise it by 5%, let’s say, then SIMALTO or similar systems could potentially help you deliver a yes vote if you could demonstrate that the majority of residents are in favour of enhanced services. Realistically though you’re only ever going to get negative publicity for raising council tax and in the age of austerity there’s no tougher sell. That’s probably why we’ve seen no council tax referendums!

So what are the financial benefits of running a survey like the one we did, where you take a representative survey and draw conclusions about budgeting from the results?

We’re here to deliver public services and a lack of money currently dictates that the delivery of services is going to have to change. In that context the best decisions are going to be the ones that are least painful to the public and the more people that are involved in making those tough decisions, the better and more popular those decisions are likely to be.

From a treasurer’s point of view, the least costly thing of all things is continuity and decisions that are supported to some extent by the public are less likely to be overhauled. Changes themselves, take redundancies for example, cost money to implement, but reversing decisions after you’ve got them wrong and the public kicks out the administration to vote the opposition in on a manifesto of undoing the changes made, is a treasurer’s worse nightmare. You’re then faced with another set of one off costs that could end up costing the council more money than it saved, even in the short-term.

Any involvement of the public should reduce the risk of costly flip-flopping where unsupported decisions are undone because there’s political capital to be made in reverting to the status quo.