The big survey of residents’ opinion ended on 30th September. As announced at the last Parish Council meeting, there was a return rate of around 67% of the forms distributed. To put this in context, most such surveys do no better than about 25-30% per household. What’s more, New Buckenham’s survey was for each resident over the age of 16 years.
We are most grateful for this exceptional response from our local community.
Since the survey closed the team has been transferring all the responses to the database – a very time consuming process, especially when faithfully transcribing all the comments. As we’ve said before, the forms are anonymous and those doing this have no idea who submitted them. The enormous number of returned forms means that this task, and the subsequent analysis, will take longer than we would like but we want to get it right. Some of the results will be released next month on this website and in Parish News.
What are the next steps? When the results are analysed we will be able to see which areas of more detailed research are needed. This will include consulting village groups and stakeholders such as Natural England, Historic England, Norfolk Wildlife Trust, land owners, transport authorities and local government. We will engage experts for this part of the work, for which there is government funding. At the same time we’ll be engaging a specialist town planner to oversee what we do and make sure that the draft plan, when we get there, is in accordance with all the regulations. And then there’ll be further consultations with the village, but that’s for next year.
And the prize draw? The winning numbers of two completed surveys (one for each age group 16-24yrs and over 25yrs) will be drawn by the Parish Clerk at the next meeting on 14th November
