We take all your comments seriously; they enable us to
improve our service. You can make comments, suggestions,
complaints, or even compliments about our service by using the
contact details on the Electoral Services page.
We completed our review of the polling districts in the Borough
that was required under the Electoral Administration Act 2006 on
6th March 2008. In this review we have made a number of small
changes across the Borough to the polling districts that define
where people vote and to their associated polling stations.
However, these changes were intended to address anomalies. For
example, the Haygate Borough Ward was divided into two polling
districts; these served no practical purpose and the voters of the
whole ward vote together at the same polling station, and therefore
it was decided to merge these districts. It is hoped that the
review will have minimal effects for the voters, and where there is
an effect, voting will be more convenient for many voters. For
example, in the parish of Chetwynd, many voters who live near to
the village of Sambrook and its polling station were travelling
some distance to vote at a polling station in a porta-cabin at
Puleston Farm. We have given a comment to our Licensing Committee
that, where there have been changes, we will notify the electors
through the poll card, by notices at former polling stations and by
press releases. Full details of the new Polling Scheme can be seen
on the Where you Vote part of our website.
At the beginning of the year, we conducted a full audit of our
38,000 postal voting applications. This audit was intended to
ensure that all data and personal identifiers (scanned signatures
and dates of birth) for all our postal voters were properly
captured and accurate. We were not satisfied with the data that we
had captured for 202 of our postal voters, and we wrote to them
inviting them to send new application forms to us. 48 electors
failed to respond to this and a further enquiry and we have removed
their facility to vote by post, informing them of our decision and
enclosing a final application form for them to submit another
application if they so wish. A significant proportion of our
electorate - 32% - vote by post, and we continue to be vigilant of
the integrity of the postal voting system.
During the Summer, we have conducted a part electronic and part
manual matching of our property database with the Authority's Local
Land and Property Gazetter (LLPG). We intend to be the first major
service in the Authority to be fully compliant with the LLPG which
is the core address database of the Authority. In part, this work
has been driven by the Government in a Directive that was issued by
the Ministry of Justice in April 2008, and the Government has
provided funding to the Authority of £4,720 for the software and
staff time required for the work, with a requirement that we become
compliant by December 2009. Telford & Wrekin Council will
achieve compliance in January 2009. This is seen as an important
step in improving the accuracy and compatability of our property
database, which underpins all our work. In the longer term as well,
the work contributes to the Government's aims to have e-enabled
elections and to better monitor party funding through its
Co-ordinated On-line Record of Electors project.
The team and the Electoral Services Manager were the main
contributors to a course on Parish Matters that was organised by
the Association of Electoral Adminisrtators in the Autumn of 2008.
This course was held nationally at nine venues and attracted some
250 participants. In particular, it focused on Community Governance
Reviews under the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health
Act 2007, and a valuable manual was produced to accompany the
course. A revised and advance version of this manual on Community
Governance Reviews can be found in the Sharing our Good Practice
section of this website.
The team undertook a considerable amount of work during the summer
of 2008 on ensuring that the service's policies and procedures met
the Performance Standards for Electoral Registration Officers that
have been laid down by the Electoral Commission. Some of the policy
documents that have been produced can by found in our Sharing our
Good Practice part of this website. Our assessment of our
performance against the Commission's Standards can be found under
our Performance Report 2008-2009 on this website.
We have been concerned to ensure that our annual canvass is as
comprehensive as we can make it and that we meet our duties in the
Representation of the People Act 1983. We adopted a recruitment
plan to increase the number of our canvassers from 12 to 27 in
2008; we provided every canvasser with appropriate training and a
canvasser manual and we have taken feedback from our canvassers at
the end of the canvass period. We were able to increase our
responses via personal canvasser from 14,406 in 2007 to 21,396 in
2008 as a result of this work. Our canvasser materials are included
in our Sharing our Good Practice section of our website.
We entirely redesigned our Canvass Stationery for this year's
canvass. We were anxious to make the stationery as user-friendly
and as attractive as possible. We were particularly anxious to
ensure that the stationery prompted more people to register by
internet or telephone, which has an obvious cost and administrative
benefit for us. We were particularly pleased that our internet and
telephone registration increased from 8,002 users in 2007 to 15,218
in 2008. Our new stationery can be viewed under Canvass Forms in
our Sharing our Good Practice section of this website. We consider
that our 2008-2009 Register has benefited considerably from this
work. We reduced the number of households that we were unable to
directly contact to 3,727 or 5.5% of our property database, and for
1,921 of these we were able to conduct what we considered were
adequate checks through other council records to ensure that the
register remained accurate. We ensured that these checks met the
standards that we have laid down in our Integrity Plan and in our
Policy on Consulting Other Council Records (copies of these
documents can be found in our Sharing our Good Practice section of
this website).
We have begun a polling station Disability Access Audit in December
2008 to ensure that our polling stations are compliant with the
Disability Discrimination Act 1995. Our survey form can be viewed
in our Polling District Review section in our Sharing our Good
Practice section of this website.
The team has produced a valuable learning tool for use in our
schools, our "Listen up n Learn" Democracy Pack. This has been
distributed to all the secondary schools in our Borough with a
feedback form attached, and it can be viewed in the Young People
section of this website.
We conducted a voter registration survey of 2,000 properties in our
Borough, through a form that we attached to the annual canvass
form. 426 households responded to our survey, and the assessment of
their responses and details of how we intend to follow up the
comments that we received is attached to this page of our website.
The key findings of that survey were as follows:
- The overall satisfaction rating for Electoral Services in
Telford & Wrekin is very high, with 86% saying that they are
either fairly or very satisfied with the service they
receive.
- There is a very high satisfaction rating among postal voters
for the service they are provided with; 87% of respondents state
that they are either fairly or very satisfied with our service
here;
- The huge majority - 92% - found the postal voting pack fairly
or very easy to use;
- A siginficant minority of 21% of respondents did not realise
that they had to register as voters every year;
- While 15,218 of our 67,500 householders have registered by
telephone or internet this year, there is still a strong preference
in our community for registering by post;
- There is a very strong preference - 74% - for the traditional
ways of voting - by ballot paper at the polling station or by
postal vote. Even so, there is an openess to new forms of voting,
by internet, telephone or mobile phone;
- Although the number of respondents who had accessed our website
was fairly low - 51 respondents - 26 found it fairly or very
informative.
We have only received one complaint during the past year, and
upon investigation we found that this was occasioned by a clerical
error in the processing of a canvass form. Errors of this sort are
extremely rare, not least because of the checking systems that we
have built into our data processing. All data that we input to the
system is inputted and then checked by a member of the team who did
not undertake the original inputting work. We received one letter
expressing concerns about a registration entry which followed on
from a credit reference check, but we found on investigation that
we had undertaken all the necessary corrections to the register in
a timely manner.
This website has been extended and, we hope, improved during the
past year. We also supply a hard copy of the information that is
contained here to the public libraries in the
area. |