Budget Consultation

2009

At the end of 2009 we commissioned Research for Today to carry out a budget exercise using the SIMALTO modelling approach, this method puts residents in the driving seat, giving them a fixed budget to allocate across a range of competing service levels and ultimately say what they would save or cut in the council’s budget if they were in charge.

This method is widely used across the country and uses face to face interviews, from a random, but representative sample, of 250 residents in their homes. We ran a simpler version of the survey online through our website and through the local press, at the same time. This consultation closed on 04 December 2009.

A Summary of the results for both consultations are now available.

2007

One of the main consultation excercises we carried out in 2007 was the budget modelling consultation using SIMALTO. Details of the consultation and the results are avaiable in the Executive Summary (27.60 KB)

2005

In 2005 we used a new approach to budget consultation to help us identify the levels of service residents most want.

We commissioned Research for Today to carry out a consultation exercise for us using the SIMALTO modelling approach. This method asks residents, through a face to face survey, to select priorities from a choice of alternative levels for each service. In effect to identify services where they most want to see improvements or reductions. Their choices are ‘realistic’ as they are shown the relative savings/extra costs of each different service level and only have fixed budgets to allocate across the competing service levels.

The Executive Summary (30.31 KB) of the reseach is available to view as well as the full Simalto Reseach Report. (293.58 KB)