Consultation service delivery

About this service

The Council regularly consults with local residents, partners and other stakeholders. This enables customers and other interested parties to have opportunities to be involved in planning, prioritising and monitoring of services.

We are committed to asking local people for their views and opinions on particular issues or services in order to diagnose problems assess service standards and check performance. These views can then be used to inform the decisions regarding the issue or service.

A variety of methods are used to engage the local community, such as:

  • Peoples' Voice panel and surveys - 3,500 adult Wiltshire residents across all Community Areas
  • Tomorrow's Voice surveys of young people - 1,500+ 11-18 year olds
  • Carers' Voice panel and surveys - 500+ carers who care for an elderly relative, friend or neighbour
  • Community roadshows and focus groups
  • Wiltshire County Council Consultation Strategy (pre April 2009) 414kb
    This document was written before our Unitary Council status and a new version will be released later this year.

The engagement of local people, community groups and stakeholders in identifying corporate and service priorities requires effective consultation techniques, open-minded dialogue and good research and intelligence-gathering both inside and outside the organisation.

At a local decision-making level, Councillors are supported in their community leadership role to work with service managers, community planners and other local partners to address local priorities and projects through the highly consultative community planning process. Community plans have become part of a systematic consultation process to feed local priorities directly into the Council's service planning process. Community planning is also a means to help strengthen the community's capacity to engage in meaningful consultation with the Council and aims to be inclusive of disadvantaged and hard-to-reach groups.

We have published a revised consultation strategy called Wiltshire's Voices based on feedback from officers and also people who had been involved in consultation exercises with the Council. This strategy shows the way the Council is listening and responding to local people and connecting with communities in Wiltshire. A set of protocols has also been adopted by the Council to instruct staff on how to carry out consultation with different types of communities, service users, Parish and Town Councils etc.

Contact Details

Email: research@wiltshire.gov.uk
Telephone: 01225 713186
Fax: 01225 713160
Postal Address:
Research Centre
Room 241
Corporate Policy and Research, Communications and Programme Office
Wiltshire Council
County Hall
Trowbridge
Wiltshire
BA14 8JN

Last updated: 2 September 2009