Epping Forest District Council

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PRODUCT CONSULTATION PROCESSING

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About Epping Forest District Council

Epping Forest is a local government district north-east of Greater London in Essex named after Epping Forest, of which the district contains a large part. In 2012, the Council started the preparation of a new Local Plan, replace the existing 1998 Local Plan and 2006 Alterations documents. The new Local Plan will guide development in the district up to 2033, being used to deal with planning applications and to provide land allocations.

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Challenge

With such an important plan shaping the future development of the Epping Forest District, the Council undertook an extensive public consultation, a 50-page survey was produced which could be completed independently or as part of an organised group and submitted via email, by letter or by completed physical survey. Over 3,000 responses were received and due to the nature of public consultations, many of the responses received were qualitative in nature, meaning high volumes of hand written and typed data needed to be processed and interpreted, in order to give due consideration to the responses received. Epping Forest District Council sought to find a partner who could process the consultation responses to a high standard, capturing every piece of information from the consultation, in a time and cost efficient manner.  

Solution

The team at Epping Forest District Council approached Adetiq to process the large volume of responses. Adetiq’s long standing history and experience of processing extensive planning and consultation surveys enabled Adetiq to offer pro-active advice to Epping Forest District Council to ensure that the responses could be processed in the most efficient manner. Adetiq’s data security credentials also gave Epping Forest District Council piece of mind that all data and documents would be handled in a completely secure environment. 
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Adetiq supplied Epping Forest District Council with a dedicated email address for all electronic responses to be received and also received any physical responses into a mail sorting room. The Adetiq mail room team sorted through all responses which were each given a unique reference code and then passed to the appropriate team for processing. All responses whether received by survey, letter or email were captured using Adetiq’s bespoke, secure data entry system, which enabled measures to be put in place for the purposes of quality control. Once processed, all responses were passed through the quality control team at Adetiq to ensure a high level of accuracy within the captured responses. Finally, the data was exported into a complex database, as required by Epping Forest District Council to ensure that due consideration could be given to each response received.