Community Involvement
Involving and listening to people is at the heart of everything we do in South Tyneside. It is central to achieving our overall vision of a better future for South Tyneside’s people. Without it we cannot respond to the issues that are important to our communities and it is key to providing excellent services that reflect the needs and wishes of local communities.
In 2008 the first joint comprehensive Community Involvement Strategy for the Borough was agreed by key public sector partners in the Local Strategic Partnership.
This overarching strategy sets out the way we will work in partnership to coordinate and join up our community involvement activities where possible. This holistic approach helps ensure we minimise duplication and avoid ‘consultation fatigue’ amongst our residents, community and voluntary groups.
Involving residents has many aspects including:
● Raising awareness of the Council and showing how we have listened to their concerns through our ‘we asked...you said....we did" listening campaign
● Taking consultation into each of our communities through our Community Road-show programme
● Working closely with our communities of common interest to ensure that their voice is heard
● Undertaking surveys such as the Place Survey and neighbourhood surveys to understand better what people think about services and the area in which they live.
● Working with residents in some of our most disadvantaged neighbourhoods to better understand the issues they face and help to target services to address these. Our innovative participatory appraisal process has received national recognition.
● Working through our Community Area Forums to identify and respond to concerns in our community areas and address these.
Ensuring appropriate involvement is important for every Council service. Service Plans for 2009/12 include a statement of community involvement setting out how individual services have used consultation and engagement to develop their activities over the last year and what they will be doing this year to respond to residents.
We want to meet the rising expectations of our community and ensure that residents can contact us and access the services they want and need in a way that suits them. Our Customer Services Strategy ‘Serving South Tyneside’ sets out how we will do this. Our aspiration is to make it as easy as possible to be a customer in South Tyneside. We have developed a Guide to Council Service Standards, which sets out the levels of service you can expect from South Tyneside Council. We actively encourage our citizens to tell us what they think of our services and are constantly looking to improve by listening to what our customers tell us they want.
