We were sent a questionnaire a few days ago by Essex County Council. I haven't filled it in, since I haven't much felt like doing anything, and the Systems Administrator hasn't filled it in because the SA never completes forms unless relating to an issue impacting us directly. So the SA was lead correspondent and lobbyist on the quarry plans, but I was the one who eventually sent back the survey from our MP canvassing our views on a range of issues. (I do wonder whether data collected from the self-selected subset of the population who can be bothered to fill forms in should be considered representative of the views of the whole).
The Essex County Council form is making me feel vaguely guilty and anxious as it sits on the window sill with its reply-paid envelope. When my elected representatives have bothered to spend time and (my) money canvassing my opinions on my life in Essex, shouldn't I respond? It seems rather feeble to limit my participation in the democratic process to going out to vote every few years (I always vote, on principal. The SA not so regularly) when I could do more.
But it is such a difficult form. I'm not sure what some of the questions mean, and maybe the researchers (from Birmingham, not Essex) will not interpret my answers to their (misunderstood) questions in the way I should like. Does amalgamating the answers to a whole pile of ambiguous forms produce any data of value, or just give a spurious veneer of consultation and legitimacy to an essentially meaningless process? It's as bad as the census and their rooms originally intended to be bedrooms (am I a psychic that I know the intentions of our predecessors when they built the house?).
Questions 1 and 2 aren't so bad, in that they ask me how satisfied I am overall with my local area as a place to live, defining local area as 15 to 20 minutes walking distance from my home. I don't like the wind turbine, or the solar farm, and the lettuce farm is sometimes quite noisy at times of the day when I'd rather it was quiet, but I do like my garden, and the view of ancient woods if you look away from the solar farm. We have never been burgled, the neighbours don't cause us any bother, and we are not planning to move. So I can tick the box saying I am fairly satisfied.
Then it gets more ambiguous: From your home, how easy or difficult is it for you to get to open spaces in Essex using your natural form of transport? My natural form of transport is, I suppose, my legs. It certainly isn't public transport because there isn't even a bus stop within fifteen or twenty minutes walk of my house. I do have a car, so does that include open spaces I can drive to? In fifteen to twenty minutes? And what is an open space? There aren't any parks within fifteen minutes walk or drive, but do they mean the countryside? Should that be a footpath, or does a country lane count? How busy does the traffic have to be before it stops counting as an open space? I think the answer to their question is probably Very Easy, given that I could walk multiple ten mile loops from my front door, if I wanted to, doing the minimum of it on main roads, but wouldn't a more pertinent question be whether I was satisfied with the state of the footpaths? Or whether I have easy access to public transport?
By the time it gets to how you make public spaces in Essex more accessible (question 6) I'm completely lost, because I don't know what a public space is in this context. Make map reading compulsory in schools? GP surgeries to organise walking groups? Don't close public loos in villages across Essex to save money (a recent Colchester Borough wheeze. Fear of being caught short is as good a reason to not visit West Mersea or Dedham as I can think of).
Question 7 asks how satisfied I am about safety on the roads. Are we still talking about a fifteen or twenty minute walk of my house now we're talking about cars, or am I meant to answer this as a pedestrian? I think the council has been doing a pretty good job on potholes in the past year, much better than some other parts of the country, but the continued failure to sort out the dangerous junctions on the A120 is a disgrace. But I think that is the responsibility of the Highways Authority. If so should I forget about the A120, and will other people filling in the form know that their views on dangerous junctions shouldn't influence their response?
They want to know about my exercise in the past week. If I filled that in truthfully I'd appear almost entirely sedentary, so they could use it as the basis to start cooking up all sorts of schemes to increase my exercise levels, which would be entirely unnecessary given that in the normal way of things when I don't have a cold I'm pretty physically active. And as to whether Essex County Council provides good customer service, most of the services I use are provided by my district council, or the NHS. The dump is quite nice, and the bins are normally collected on the right day, but that's outsourced to Veolia. Has Essex made a good job of outsourcing the one service you think you receive directly from the county council? As to the quality of my built environment, I have no idea how to answer. The lettuce polytunnels are extremely high tech, among the most advanced in Europe. They certainly could not be accused of being low quality. Do I like looking at them? Not particularly.
I'm not sure about this form. It has a one size fits all quality, that seems incapable of picking up the nuances of life in any particular place. The research company is probably using the same form all over the country, just deleting the word Essex and inserting Devon or Powys. But life in a rural part of the Tendring peninsular is different to life in central Colchester, or a big estate in Chelmsford, or Billericay, or Basildon. How on earth do you lump together my experiences of open space, drug dealing, teenagers hanging about or the built environment with that of people living in those places in any meaningful way?
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