Multiple-choice survey on £3.5m budget cuts follows auditor criticism of council public consultation methods

Exeter City Council is promoting a multiple-choice survey on £3.5 million of budget cuts it plans to make next year – and its medium-term corporate priorities – after an auditor found that its “public consultation process is not working efficiently or effectively”.

The online survey, described by council leader Phil Bialyk as “an important way for people to make their voices heard on the future of our city”, is running in parallel with a private opinion poll of 0.84% of the city’s population. The council has not said whether the survey and poll ask the same questions.

An introduction to the survey says that its consultations comply with a consultation charter that it adopted in July 2021. However a corporate governance audit conducted in March found “limited assurance” in seventeen areas it examined, including the council’s ability to ensure “openness and comprehensive stakeholder engagement” in its approach to public consultations.

The auditor assessed eight of 28 consultations it found on the council consultation web page, finding one that had been planned but not taken place, another that had taken place but for which no results or outcome had been published, and a third presented as open that had actually closed.

Three more consultations had been completed but neither results nor outcome had been signposted, another had not provided a point of contact for respondents and another was a tenant survey and not a public consultation at all.

The auditor also found that the council’s consultations were difficult to locate and that its website said written petitions should be sent to an officer whose post had been deleted when he left his job.

Several of the consultations the auditor assessed did not comply with one or more provisions of the council’s consultation charter, despite the charter saying that it covers all the consultations the council conducts.

The council’s strategic management board received the auditor’s report at the end of the summer and agreed to take remedial action. CEO Bindu Arjoon said the council was, by then, already making “significant progress” on the issues raised.

The report itself says Jo Yelland, the responsible director, was taking a “fresh approach as to how the council consults with the public”, and treating it as a priority.

However while the council’s approach to its current budget cuts and corporate priorities survey constitutes a change in priorities, it can hardly be considered an improvement.

The first page is dedicated to a spun summary of the otherwise unpublished results of a private opinion poll of Exeter residents carried out in July and August, in which at least one Labour councillor was invited to participate.

These results, which the council says informed the current survey, are also apparently included to influence its respondents. They lead with the finding that “the vast majority are satisfied with their local area as a place to live”.

Respondents are then led through another seven pages of preamble before they reach the survey itself, several of which are adorned with context-free council-promoting factoids.

These include: “We have a total of eight public EV ChargePoints across the city” but not, for example, that there are 87,300 motor vehicles registered in Exeter, and: “Exeter Leisure membership in 2023 was 63% higher than in 2022” but not that its subsidy is forecast to exceed £2.6 million in 2024-25.

The survey itself then continues in the same vein. No financial information is included with the budget survey multiple-choice questions, nor anything explaining their impact or scale, other than a single, headline statement that the council intends to cut its budget by £3.5 million next year.

There are no explanations of the relationships or trade-offs between the options presented by one question or another. Several options overlap with each other while some are framed as reductions and others as absolute cuts.

Respondents are compelled to answer one question before proceeding to the next, and it is not possible to view subsequent questions without providing an answer.

Numerous significant spending areas are ignored altogether and a single open-ended comment box does not say it is limited to 150 word responses or give any indication that longer responses will be deleted when they are submitted.

Five questions on corporate priorities follow. Each is introduced with the same text with which respondents were presented in the survey preamble, presumably to ensure the council gets its messages across.

In several cases respondents are then required to pick priorities that the council has already confirmed it intends to pursue, while in others there is no explanation that the delivery of what appear to be council pledges is actually required by law.

The survey also fails to explain that it invites respondents to rank statutory services that the council is required to deliver against discretionary services that it is not.

All the options are vague, some combine two choices into one. Others appear absurd, such the option to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change by removing graffiti. All must be ranked in response to each question to proceed to the next.

There are, again, numerous significant omissions, although perhaps there are no prizes for guessing why “better governance” is not offered as an option to rank under the “well-run council” heading.

Any respondents who “need the survey in a different format”, which we assume means the option to complete the survey on paper, in person or by phone, are invited to contact the council online by clicking a link that leads to another online form with 22 options, none of which are for the survey.

The council’s budget cuts and corporate priorities survey opened on 18 November. The auditor’s report on its public consultation performance was not published until the day after, for an audit and governance committee meeting held on 27 November.

A long-planned review of the council’s consultation policy was, as if by chance, scheduled to take place at a council scrutiny committee the very next day. However, as so often with council decision-making, scrutiny was nowhere to be found.

City councillor Yvonne Atkinson submitted a formal request for a “review of the consultation policy” to the council scrutiny programme board back in September 2023. Her request was accepted in December then appeared on the scrutiny work plan in January this year – then in March and again in May – as scheduled for scrutiny at a meeting in June.

However when the committee met there was no consultation policy review item on the agenda because, it transpired, it had been postponed to October instead.

The October meeting arrived, but director Jo Yelland did not present her report to the committee because she was not there. No explanation for her absence was provided. City councillor Laura Wright, who said she had read the report – which ran to all of 330 words – while sitting in the public gallery, said she might be able to answer questions instead.

She said the report, the title of which was not “Review of consultation policy” as had appeared in the nine scrutiny committee documents leading up to the meeting, was instead “an update because, apparently, this scrutiny committee asked for an update on the consultation charter”.

She added that the committee would not be “scrutinising the charter because it doesn’t exist yet”.

When challenged, she said she meant “the new one”. When challenged again, she said: “Yes, there’s going to be a new update to the consultation charter, and there’s already things that have been in place with the customer service residents survey, which is ongoing.

“All of this is, and it’s very confusing, when you look at it, is actually an update, a requested update, because scrutiny has asked for updates on the consultation charter and consultation process.

“So the update to the committee is that we are appointing somebody to be totally in charge, to start to try and align the way we do consultation in order to meet the consultation charter.”

Mostly baffled, presumably because no decision to produce a new consultation charter has been taken by councillors, at least in public, the committee voted to defer the item until its November meeting when Jo Yelland might be expected to explain what was going on.

When the committee met in November the agenda item was still called “Review of Consultation Policy” on the scrutiny work plan. But Jo Yelland’s report – this time stretching to nearly 550 words – had changed its name again. It was now described as “narrative, as requested by members”, and called simply: “Consultation Charter”.

It said that the council charter had been updated in September 2023, although the version published on the council website is dated August 2022. The “pockets of good practice” cited in the previous report had become “many examples of good practice” in the month that had passed.

Remarkably, the report skated past the auditor’s criticism of the council’s consultation performance, mentioning “feedback from external auditors who have highlighted opportunities for improving consultation to aid budget setting”.

It said that the council would be adopting a new consultation strategy in the new year, presumably to liberate it from as many of the charter provisions it has found so difficult to uphold as it can get away with without obviously breaching the Local Government Association guidance on engagement.

It also came with an appendix that was a straight copy of the council consultation web page in which the auditor had found fault. Not to illustrate the council’s consultation failures but, apparently, to evidence its preceding charter compliance.

Before leaving the meeting early, Jo Yelland said one aim of the council’s new approach to public consultation was to link surveys together, apparently so responses to one could be taken out of context and cited as responses to another.

Council CEO Bindu Arjoon was more conciliatory, admitting that it would have to accept that it hadn’t really delivered so far but assuring councillors that it was resolved to do better in future.

The council ran 26 public consultations in the three years to this August. Taking our cues from the auditor’s approach, we assessed each for compliance against the consultation charter’s provisions.

We found numerous breaches including a near-complete failure to connect consultations with their results, or subsequent outcomes. We were, in many cases, unable to trace any relationship between decisions taken by council committees and the consultations that they apparently followed.

In some cases decisions have apparently been taken and implemented without councillors seeing the results of consultations at all. The public open space disposals at Exwick playing fields, known as Flowerpot Fields, and King George V playing fields both fall into this category, as does the consultation on the controversial allotment fees increases imposed earlier this year.

The outcome of this consultation has finally surfaced, quietly and in the margins. Curiously, while the accompanying report is dated as if it was written in July, it appears to have been produced in December, shortly after the auditor’s report on the council’s poor consultation performance was published.

Other consultations are currently under way, such as one prompted by the sale of 4.5 acres of public open space in Riverside Valley Park. The council has omitted critically-important contextual information from the materials which accompany this consultation, but has included a promotional leaflet provided by the site’s prospective developer.

This consultation does not close for another fortnight, and the council is required by law to consider any objections it receives, but it has already said that it intends to re-affirm the decision to sell the land, at a February meeting that will be held in private with press and public excluded.

The survey on the council’s budget cuts and corporate priorities closes at 5pm on Thursday 9 January.

While it does not say so anywhere in the council website survey pages, it is also possible to complete the survey by phoning 01392 277888 or in person at the council’s Paris Street customer service centre between 9am and 2pm on weekdays, except when it is closed for the holidays.