Tameside is one of the ten metropolitan boroughs of Greater Manchester, sharing borders with Manchester, Stockport and Oldham, and skirted by Derbyshire to the east. An increasingly mixed and modern local economy has evolved from the strong manufacturing heritage of its nine constituent towns, which include Ashton-under-Lyne, Denton, Hyde and Stalybridge.

POLICY UNIT

The Policy Unit at Tameside has a wide range of responsibilities including corporate consultation and research, performance management, the equalities agenda, and the administration of Tameside’s Local Strategic Partnership. The workforce currently stands at nine, led by Head of Policy Megan Nurse, and with Graduate Support Officers Joy Thompson and Jonathon Blackburn as its newest recruits.

Staff of the Tameside Policy Unit
Back row - Joy Thompson, Jonathan Platt, Simon Brunet, James Smith, Jonathon Blackburn
Front row – Sarah Newsam, Megan Nurse, Anne Cunningham, Kate O’Donnell

CONSULTATION AT TAMESIDE

Tameside has a strong tradition of consultation with residents, carried out both corporately and by individual services, as part of its drive to improve services. It has been running regular Residents’ Opinion Surveys since 1995 and a Citizens’ Panel since 1998, and has recently been recognised as a Beacon Council for Getting Closer to Communities.
The main elements of the Corporate Consultation Programme are as follows:-

• Residents’ Opinion Survey: This is an in-home face-to-face survey with 1,100 residents to find out views on the Council and living in Tameside. The sample is representative of the local population for gender, age and work status across the Borough and each of its eight District Assembly areas, and contains a booster sample from ethnic minority groups to ensure robust results for this population.
  
• Citizens’ Panel: The Citizens’ Panel, run on behalf of the Council by an independent research agency, consists of approximately 2,000 members who are broadly representative of the Borough population. Panel members agree to receive three postal surveys per year and response rates of around 70% are regularly achieved. Every year one-third of panel members are replaced, to make sure that the panel maintains its independence of the Council.
  
• Employee Survey: This self-completion survey takes place every two years. Questionnaires are distributed with payslips to non-school staff, and the results are fed into the Council’s business planning process. The survey investigates views of the Council and its service delivery, the employee’s job, motivation, training and development, internal communication, the Council as an employer, and the Council as a place to work.
  
• Young People’s Online Survey (Year 10): This two-yearly online survey was introduced in 2003 as we recognised that a different method was needed to obtain feedback from young residents of the Borough. The survey is carried out via Tameside schools and the first survey investigated views of Tameside, the Council and its partners, drugs and alcohol use, and young people’s educational aspirations.
  
• Business Opinion Survey: The two-yearly Business Opinion Survey consists of 400 telephone interviews with a representative sample of local small and medium-sized enterprises. It investigates recruitment and skills, crime, the environment, the possibility of relocation, and views of the Council and its services.
  
• Community Strategy Consultation: In 1999, three thousand people across Tameside were consulted via a mixture of surveys and events to help develop the key themes of the Borough’s first Community Strategy. Another major wave of consultation accompanied the 2002 review of the Strategy, and this pattern will be repeated to ensure that the Strategy reflects the priorities of local people.

Consultation on a smaller scale is just as important, and the Policy Unit and some individual services have invested in ‘Ask the Audience’-type electronic voting equipment, consisting of handsets and associated hardware and software. A question is read out to the audience, they enter the number of their chosen response on their handset, and the results appear on-screen in the form of a chart. This form of immediate survey and feedback is very popular with participants. Other small-scale techniques such as focus groups have been used to further explore the findings of large-scale investigations such as the Employee Survey or Citizens’ Panel surveys.

SPREADING THE WORD

The Policy Unit has responsibility for promoting best practice in consultation across the Council and beyond. It reviews the corporate Consultation Strategy on an annual basis, and supports and advises on consultation in other service areas, notably by facilitating and chairing the Council’s Consultation Link Officers Group. The Policy Unit is also represented on the Marketing & Communications Group of the Tameside Strategic Partnership, where consultation is a standing item on the agenda.

The main means of sharing information about consultation and research carried out within the Borough, or planned for the future, is the Council’s Consultation Database. This is accessible to Council officers, other organisations and the public, and details of any consultation taking place within the Borough may be submitted. Contributors can upload reports, questionnaires or data files with the details of their project, and work is ongoing to encourage participation by partner organisations. The database is currently accessible from http://www.tameside.gov.uk/corpgen3/consultation.html, but the content of these pages is due to be incorporated into an online Toolkit bringing enhanced resources and guidelines on all aspects of consultation.

'GETTING THE PROFILE RIGHT'

‘Getting the Profile Right’ was the title of this year’s LARIA Conference, and it sums up the other main research activity taking place within the Policy Unit at Tameside. This is the secondary analysis, mapping and dissemination of socio-economic, demographic and performance data, either about the borough as a whole or its constituent parts. A focus of much of this work is the annual ‘Quality of Life’ report, monitoring the progress of the Tameside Strategic Partnership. The Policy Unit was also responsible for the production of Area Profiles of Tameside Wards, District Assemblies and Regeneration Areas based on the 2001 Census.

Up to now, electronic dissemination of such data has largely consisted of writing reports as traditional Word documents and placing them on the web. However, staff in IT Services are currently developing a statistical resource as part of the wider Tameside Knowledge Management Project. As well as providing a central repository for research reports, this will enable users to access a wide range of datasets directly, and chart, map or download the data to suit their own requirements.

CONTACTS:-

Consultation: Kate O’Donnell, 0161 342 2174, kate.odonnell@tameside.gov.uk
Profiling: Anne Cunningham, 0161 342 2170, anne.cunningham@tameside.gov.uk

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