Case Study : Neighbourhood planning with Melksham Town Council
Neighbourhood Plans are a statutory document designed to give local communities control over future land use development in their region, by ensuring funding for amenities and facilities and informing developers what and where they can build within a plan area.
In 2014 a local Steering Group was established in Melksham, Wiltshire, to produce a Neighbourhood Plan for the area within Melksham Town and Melksham Without Parish Council’s boundaries.
The Project
The Steering Group set out to produce a ‘scoping’ document to identify criteria against which local development proposals could be judged, decide priorities for housing and other infrastructure, and gather supporting evidence for decisions made.
To do so, the Council group worked with our engagement team to write a survey published to the public area of the MyCommunity website. Questions were designed to obtain both quantitative and qualitative, non-attributable data that would form the basis of the scoping document.
The Results
To gauge residents’ priorities, our survey asked respondents to rank twenty-six statements as being of ‘high’, ‘moderate’, ‘low’ or ‘no’ concern to them. The results were surprising: 91.3% of respondents considered adequate healthcare, public transport and education facilities more important than building new homes in the town. 75% voted to restore the minor injuries and treatment facilities at Melksham Hospital; 62.8% wanted free parking in the town’s car parks; 61.5% backed an increase in rail services to the town station and 58.8% favoured local job creation.
Only 38.1% of respondents considered the housing and recreational facilities being built along the Wilts and Berkshire Canal as of high priority. Given the publicity the canal project had generated, this low figure offered an important insight to the Council: more needed to be done to gather public support for ongoing changes along the waterway.
Using our standard interactive results report, the Steering Group could access anonymised data on the age, gender, interests and location of their respondents. In this way, the group were able to guarantee the diversity of their results – a key step towards making informed decisions and achieving accountability towards their local community.
What Happened Next?
Based on the insights offered by their MyCommunity survey, the Steering Group hosted a conventional open-house consultation event after the close of their online campaign. The group plan to host a second survey at MyCommunity.net following the publication of their scoping document, to further refine their final Neighbourhood Plan.
If you’re a council leader or communications professional looking to engage with local communities, click to find out more about our breakthrough online survey service or contact us directly.