Letter: How Surveys of Public Opinion Should Be Organised

Published on: 10 Jun, 2025
Updated on: 10 Jun, 2025

From Bernard Quoroll

former local authority CEO

In response to: Revealed Survey Shows SCC’s Preferred Two-unitary Option Has Least Public Support

Here is how such surveys to judge public opinion on proposed changes to local government should be undertaken.

Firstly, they should be commissioned jointly by all the local authorities involved.

Secondly, they should be conducted by an independent pollster who routinely drafts such questions using fair and impartial. language. (It is only too easy to shape an outcome by choice of words).

Thirdly, the pollster should be in a position to demonstrate that the audience polled is representative and that the results have been weighted using industry adopted standards.

Fourthly and perhaps most importantly, it should be preceded by a widely publicised and accessible options report, independently verified and which explains the options and implications of the available choices in a balanced and informative way.

In past reorganisations, that has also included area-wide public presentations and opportunities for questions in a wide variety of venues and formats, all of which of course takes time. In the absence of transparency it is legitimate to conclude that this survey is not worth the paper it was written on.

It is sadly unsurprising, given past history, that our own county seems to have sought to bin the results of its own partial and in-house attempt to mislead its own voters when it did not produce the hoped for result. It is no consolation that the districts and boroughs have behaved little better. In that sense they all have form.

Nor is it reassuring that the Government created this whole sorry mess by adopting absurd and unjustified population size parameters, without reference to local circumstances and trying to ram them through at breakneck speed. My first instinct is to conclude that this whole process could not get any worse. My second is to fear that the worst is yet to come.

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