Best value is a government initiative backed by legislation which calls on local authorities to ensure that all their services deliver the best possible value for the stakeholder. Each service must be subjected to examination known as the "Four Cs".
- Challenge
Why is the service carried out at all? - Consult
What do customers think about the service and the level of performance? - Compare
How does our performance compare against the best of the public and private sector? - Compete
Can other providers deliver the service more effectively?
Our interest is in the need for consultation of stakeholders, which means that authorities need to conduct research to discover what stakeholders want and need, and how well services are meeting those preferences.
Our founder and Principal Consultant, David Lusty, spent 11 years working in local authorities, and he understands the many pressures on officers and members.
Panels
Postal self completion surveys are a reliable low cost vehicle for much of the consultation you may wish to conduct. Cold mailed postal surveys, however, often produce a poor response rate which leads to wasted mailing costs, small samples and brings into question the significance of the results produced. Given the self-selecting nature of the response it often also means that minority groups' views are inadequately represented.
The panel is a more or less permanent group of people who have expressed their willingness to take part in consultation surveys and the response to a panel mailing is typically much better than to a cold mailing. Response rates depend on the quality of recruitment, the quality of the materials mailed and the rigour with which responses are monitored and non-responding members weeded out and replaced.
The members of the panel are self-selected, just as would be those who bothered to respond to a cold mailing. In the case of the panel, however, you have control over the membership and can monitor and, by targeted recruitment, control the representation on the panel of the minorities whose views you need to hear. Unfortunately, there are many people who do not wish to take part in surveys and not even the expensive services of the most determined face to face interviewers will prevent these people from deselecting themselves from the achieved response.
We manage panels of residents for two of the London Boroughs; the London Borough of Harrow, which was one of the pilot authorities for Best Value, and the London Borough of Hillingdon. These panels are groups of residents who together are reasonably representative of the population of the Borough and have each agreed to respond to surveys.
We have also conducted stakeholder research for
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Panel members provide a range of personal data when they join, which allows us to select groups to approach for surveys which are not of general interest, and simplifies the instrument we need to use for each survey because we don't need to ask informants to answer all the demographic classification questions which would normally be included - we have all that information on file already. We are registered for Data Protection purposes to allow us to handle personal data for panel clients. We use panel data only for panel research on behalf of the relevant authority and its public sector partners, such as the NHS.
Response monitoring
Provided we have the panel member's registration number on a response, not only can we extract any classification data held on the panel database (even relating to matters we wouldn't at first have thought might be relevant to this survey) but we also record the fact of the member's response so we can identify those who do, and those who do not respond. This allows us the opportunity as we build up a picture of members' response patterns, to remove and replace members who never seem to get round to replying in time, and thus improve further the response rate to future surveys.
