Worthing Borough Council

Your chance to be the Chancellor - 2011 Results

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01903 221109

sarah.garbutt@worthing.gov.uk

We had a great response from the Adur and Worthing residents. We had an even better response than in 2010.

• Top three money saving suggestions
• Volunteering
• Support for last year's suggestions - easy 'quick wins'
• Parking in Worthing
• New ways of saving money and innovation
• Suggestions
• Council tax next year

Top three money saving suggestions

Last year some of the respondent made some money saving suggestions and this year we asked how many residents would be happy with us taking forward those suggestions. The top 3 in each area were:

Worthing

• 83% - Felt we should further enforce the rules by issuing on the spot fine for littering and dog fouling.
• 60% - Said we should get more volunteers in to do some of the work
• 50% - Were in support of us leasing the pier to a private operator

Adur

• 59% - Said we should get more volunteers in to do some of the work
• 59% - Were in support of us doing more to help the poor and disadvantaged by supporting the Citizens Advice Bureau and the Community and Voluntary sector.
• 41% - Expand our services to compete with the private sector and make a profit.

Both sets of residents were in support of us doing more to encourage volunteering. This year given the promotion of Big Society we decided to ask our residents what if any volunteering they currently did.

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Volunteering

We asked if residents volunteered:

So there is already a lot of volunteering going on in the areas. However when asked if they would be interested in volunteering in the community the response was quite disappointing.

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Support for last year's suggestions - easy 'quick wins'

We also asked residents were in support of any of last years suggestions that we considered to be easy to do thus terming them as ‘quick wins’. These were:

Worthing

• 57% - Agreed that we should start charging for rat control in line with neighbouring councils
• 33% - Said we should cut grass in parks and grow to meadow
• 30% - Thought we should reduce the lighting along the seafront

Adur

• 64% - Said we should cut grass in the parks and grow to meadow
• 62% - Were in support of us only planting perennials
• 45% - Agreed that we should start to charge for rat control in line with neighbouring councils.

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Parking in Worthing

We asked residents about parking in Worthing and whether they considered the parking on street and off street to be successful or not:

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New ways of saving money and innovation

We also residents to give us some new and innovate ways to save money. Though we did not receive that many new and innovative ways we did receive a lot of comments on work that we have already done or are doing and also services that are the responsibility of others such as West Sussex County Council.

This information is always the most difficult to analyse and where we receive the most conflicting suggestions for example:

• Concrete over grass verges and use them for parking VS fine people for parking on verges
• Charge people to go on Worthing pier VS sell Worthing pier
• Get rid of the floral displays in Worthing VS get businesses to sponsor them

The two most popular suggestions via this box are actually the responsibility of West Sussex County Council these were:

• Stop providing free bus passes / charge a nominal charge for bus passes.
• Turn off the street lights in the early hours of the morning / Turn them down / Turn off alternate lights.

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Suggestions

There were also lots of suggestion around things that we have already done or are investigating / reviewing, perhaps this highlights a need to advertise what we are doing on a regular basis. Maybe the corporate allocation in the Herald could be used. These include:

• Publish salaries
• Executive pay cuts
• More partnership working
• Merge
• Freeze staff salaries
• Promote the use of Direct Debit
• Do more online and via email
• Investigate privatising theatres
• Review all salaries
• Cut mayoral budget
• Encourage staff to (via the Green Travel Plan)
• Car share
• Charge staff for parking
• Pool cars
• The use of solar power
• Bring parking in-house
• Reduce parking charges

This box has also been used to tell us what people want left alone so though we had a great response by this box not all of the suggestions were to save money or be in some way innovative in our business.

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Council tax next year

Probably most important to most people was the question on council tax. We asked two questions:

Did our residents want us to keep council tax at 0% and cut services?

Or increase by 2.5% and cut less services?

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