Kris Witherington, Engagement and Consultation Manager at Merton Council, gave a presentation on proposals to improve resident engagement across Merton. The presentation is attached to this report.

Kris said that the changes were focused on the work of the corporate engagement team rather than work done by many services with specific audiences and service users. The team had learnt a lot from changing approaches during COVID and from the feedback from residents on the Community Forums in 2022. They had identified three areas where improvements needed to be made and how this would be resourced through increased capacity.

The first area was face-to-face engagement, including the Community Forums. Kris said the current approach was not working as well as it should be, and instead the plan is to hold two events in each area per year. One would be a large-scale question-time event involving local services leaders, including the Leader of the Council, and the second would be more of a workshop format for residents to work together rather than a presentation and question approach. The Engagement team would also support local arrangements, working with local groups and councillors ensuring that solutions are right for each area rather than a one-size fits all approach.

The second area to improve is engagement with Civic Society, meaning resident groups, both formal organisations and informal arrangements like WhatsApp groups. The Engagement Team will look to map what work is taking place, offer a point of contact, provide an e-newsletter and host and annual event that brings these groups together.

The third area was the way residents can engage with the council digitally. Currently the Council has an online consultation hub and design tool for online survey but there are new tools available like mapping, discussion boards and an online resident’s panel.

These changes will be delivered by recruiting a new Events Officer post to manage the meetings, a Community Development Officer to work with the Civic Society and an Engagement Officer to work on digital engagement and support departmental consultations.

A resident asked where these ideas had emerged. Kris said they had looked at what took place in other boroughs and looked at where we had issues that needed to be improved in Merton.

A resident asked about the Council Twitter account and why posts were not responded to. Kris explained that the account was managed by the Communications team which does not have access to the Customer management system so can not deal with specific issues, only signpost to the ways to report those issues.

A resident asked about councillors blocking residents on Twitter and Kris said that was not an issue he could comment on.

Cllr Mercer asked about how the residents panel would work, and Kris said that the most common approach was to send out invitations randomly and then there would be an ongoing issue of replenishing the panel. It is possible to skew invitations to encourage different responses, collect demographic information and weight responses to ensure the sample is representative.