Section 1: Our survey support

The LGA provides a range of different support services to help you understand resident satisfaction in your area and compare results at a regional and national level.


National and regional polling results

The LGA conducts regular national telephone polling to track resident satisfaction with councils, three times a year. In addition, regional level results are published on an annual basis.

Question set and benchmarking for local surveys

We have developed a set of questions and guidance for councils conducting telephone surveys within their own area, who wish to benchmark their results against the LGA’s national and regional comparator figures. The document also contains a number of additional questions which are not part of the benchmarking, but which councils may find useful to include in their own local surveys.

The themes covered by the questions include:

  • satisfaction with the local area as a place to live
  • satisfaction with the way the council runs things
  • value for money
  • council responsiveness
  • how well informed the council keeps residents
  • community safety
  • trust in the council
  • satisfaction with services.

All questions were developed in consultation with the sector and with assistance from Ipsos Mori, a specialist market research agency.

Access the question set and guidance

Different types of local survey

You may not always have the time or resources to run a resident survey in line with our guidelines, or may want to ask different questions. You can of course still do this, but you will not be able to accurately compare your results to the LGA polling results.

If you are using another survey method or question set, we would still advise you to survey a large enough, random sample of people to represent your diverse population. We recommend a minimum of approximately 500 people to give you an effective perspective of the overall views of your general population, while also still providing you with the opportunity to conduct some more detailed analysis of the different groups within that population (for example analysing results by gender or broad age brackets). Your in-house research team, or survey supplier, will be able to offer advice on how best to get a random, representative sample for your area.

There may also be occasions where other types of sampling are more appropriate. For example, you might want to survey a particular group of residents. You can find advice on how to target your surveys to specific groups in our section on targeted surveys.

If you need to conduct a survey quickly, or with limited resources, you may need to consider a less representative method of finding out resident views, such as conducting face-to-face surveys in town centres. It is important to note that the results from this survey work may not be statistically robust and will not be fully comparable to other surveys, but may provide a snapshot of how a selection of people surveyed at that time feel about specific issues. Again, you can access more guidance on this in our section on targeted surveys.