Surveys show improved rate of satisfaction with the county council
Warwickshire County Council has been collating results from its Public Satisfaction Survey (PSS) with improvements being reflected in many key areas by the public.
Warwickshire County Council has been collating results from its Public Satisfaction Survey (PSS) with improvements being reflected in many key areas by the public.
The PSS is a postal survey undertaken every autumn with 4,000 randomly selected Warwickshire residents. It asks the public to state whether they are satisfied with various aspects of the council’s services.
Foremost among the trends which has seen great improvement is education services which saw 61% of respondents saying they were satisfied with the council, up 18% on 2006’s figure. Fire and Rescue Services also saw a huge leap in satisfaction with 74% of respondents expressing satisfaction up from 55.4% in 2006.
Social services, environmental services, transport services and planning services all saw significant hikes in satisfaction, in the region of 10%.
Pleasingly for the council, two questions which encapsulate how people feel about the county council both solicited positive responses. How the authority runs things and value for money both saw an increase from last year’s figures going from 55.4% to 57.7% satisfaction and from 36.1% to 40% respectively.
32% of respondents agreed that they can influence decisions affecting their local area, up 1% on 2006’s result. With the new way of working, with 23 localities for service planning and administration purposes along with 30 community for a for community engagement purposes, being finalised, that is expected to improve even further next year.
Cllr Heather Timms, portfolio holder for corporate services, said: “The survey is pleasing because it does show areas of massively increased satisfaction in some of the council’s key objectives; raising educational attainment, protecting the community. That more people felt we are offering value for money and running the authority well than this time last year shows we are moving in the right direction.
“The reason we are moving in the right direction is consultation such as this. If we are to target our resources effectively, we have to know what the public thinks about what we do. And then we have to act on it. Results of the survey have been distributed among directorates to guide them in areas where the public feel they have been improving or would like to see more improvement and I am confident of further successes in next year’s survey.”
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