News Release

What do you think of Council’s services?

Council’s annual residents’ survey, carried out by independent research company Versus Research Limited (VRL), is about to kick off.

Each year Council asks a representative sample of residents (400 households) to rate its services. The results are broken down by ward and demographics to make it easy to see trends across the District, and inform Council’s decision making into the future.

The results are used to measure levels of service across Council and are incorporated into key indicators in the Annual Report that will be released later this year.

“Over the past few years, overall service performance has remained steady across the organisation, with some good gains made in areas like youth and community services and particularly in wastewater as a result of the huge investment made there,” said Acting Chief Executive Simon Weston.

“We are looking forward to finding out how people think we are doing this year, and areas for improvement. We hope people will make time to give their feedback if VRL randomly selects their household to take part in the 25 minute survey between now and 2 July.

“We appreciate that people are busy and this is a big investment of their time, but the survey is a real opportunity to have your say and subsequently help us to improve services which impact on us all every day,” said Mr Weston.

What’s a representative sample?

Researchers will also ask you a few questions about yourself, like your age, gender and ethnic group. They use this information to make sure that the survey reflects the characteristics of the people in the six wards of Whangarei proportionately (as per population figures recorded in Census 2013 by Statistics New Zealand).

Don’t have a landline?

It is estimated that around 20-30% of people in NZ do not have a landline at home, however there is currently not publically available mobile database that can reliably be used for market research purposes, i.e., one that is privacy compliant. This means we won’t be able to reach people who have only a mobile phone, but the work done to ensure a representative sample of our District population does mean that the results will provide the community ‘voice’ as a whole.

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