Understanding the views of residents is essential for effective governance. Resident surveys are an important way of gathering this feedback. However, prior to this project, all resident surveys run in Wales were unique. This made it difficult to compare results from one council to another. We identified an opportunity to improve the consistency and comparability of these surveys by taking a ‘Once for Wales’ approach.

In collaboration with the Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA) and local councils we developed a consistent, modular, bi-lingual resident survey that would be offered to all local councils in Wales. The specific aims of the project were to:

• Reduce development and running costs through standardisation and centralisation;
• Enhance data quality and comparability through standardisation;
• Deliver useable insight via a results dashboard; and
• Prompt improvement conversations through comparison and benchmarking.

We launched the National Resident Survey in July 2024, just six months after the first discussions. In this time, we developed the national survey, signed off data protection and sharing approaches, and created a dissemination dashboard.

Read more to find out about the successes, the challenges, and what is coming next.