How can councils improve their services by hearing residents' voices?

Most of residents increasingly feel disconnected to their local governments and find engagement with the council inefficient and often difficult.

2 years ago

Contents

• - Council Ratings Platform
• - Innovation
• - Further Analysis

Most of residents increasingly feel disconnected to their local governments and find engagement with the council inefficient and often difficult. Using digitals tools developed to for new ways to engage residents are crucially important for the local governments to gain insights into the opinions of their residents for all departments, specific concerns and general issues. Councils have may departments with significant amount of workforce which also complicates oversight of services and leads to lack of transparency and accountability, and hence a loss of trust. 

Following Pandemic, people spoke out to say that they had tried to raise their concerns about the support they need but their voices had not been listened to or concerns adequately addressed.

Council Ratings Platform

Council Ratings platform has been designed to provide engagement to shape services and involvement of residents as far as it is possible in everything that affects their lives. Residents can bring resources of differentiated kind, such as reflection of a lived experience. Council Ratings will become the main intermediary of a positive way for residents to engage with their councils which can build a sense of community and provide an effective collective voice.

We need meaningful engagement between residents and the local government to increase trust in functions and services of our councils. Personal interaction matters, we need our council officers to respond visibly in public and let residents to have a real say on matters on a fully transparent platform.

Departments of council should be reachable, the communication plays a vital role in building trust and if we as residents do not have ability to discuss issues with the relevant departments that raises concerns, the community members needs to be aware of how we experience the customer service from our council to support and mend the inefficient practises. Council ratings is a platform to help change in the culture of engagement between residents and the council, increasing transparency around the performance of the council departments through indicators shown in the rating analytics.

There are community supporters in Council Ratings who can be the representative of the community to promote the views of residents and encourage the council to promote meaningful, participatory ways of involving the residents' voice in decision making.

Innovation

Innovation is involved in every part of life and most importantly a need for the communication of the public with local government and national government. This requires councils to consider how strategic decisions on how to exercise their functions affect, or could affect, those who feel not included and listened, thereupon, connect with them in a way to reduce the discomfort, and promote democracy by listening to residents' voice with no barriers arising from economic, social, religious or racial disadvantage and negative stereotyping.

The lack of innovative, effective and accessible mechanisms to engage with residents may lead to disimproved services for the public, the budget of every council may differ but using Council Ratings will provide easily accessible technology to all in the UK with no burden of ongoing development costs. The platform uses API integration to the council CRM systems also making it very efficient and requires less investment where the public money should be carefully spent for all causes. Additionally, data in this context providing all councils' performance and whole populations voice integrated into one platform will make the decision-making more effective and focusing on improving the services a priority according to the needs of the public.

Further Analysis

Further analysis of contracted and directly provided services will also be a benefit for the national government to examine, disabling environment for corruption aimed at all those charged with governance in local authorities with the duty to raise and enforce the government standards. In recent years we are having a deleterious effect on the public’s perception of the integrity of our democratic institutions and long-standing conventions around ethical standards in public life no longer seem to be observed as a matter of course. There is a delicate balance of power and accountability underpinning our democracy and to restore trust in those elected to serve the public in local government elections need to support further transparency by means of technology.

At Council Ratings we believe as a county of reputation as a beacon of the rule of law, all councils will be willing to participate in the digitalized engagement with residents with more transparency.