Media Release 
For immediate release

29 September 2023 

Overall Council satisfaction results above New Zealand benchmarks 

Kawerau District Council has received a 70% overall satisfaction rating from residents in the latest triennial survey results. This is well above the New Zealand benchmark for Councils at 50%. 

The triennial residents satisfaction survey results were received at the Council Meeting on Wednesday, 27 September 2023. 
The Triennial Residents’ Survey enables Council to measure its performance across all the activities and report against these activity service levels in the Annual Report.  

In 2023, Council changed providers to SIL Research to complete the triennial survey.

SIL Research is a company based in Hawkes Bay that provides services to more than 10 Councils, including both Ōpōtiki and Whakatāne. 
Kawerau District Council has been completing the triennial residents’ survey since the early 1990’s. It was introduced as a way to measure the overall satisfaction of Council services and operations by residents and ratepayers. 

NRB or the National Research Bureau formerly completed the survey. The reason for Council changing to SIL Research was primarily to obtain a better set of results for the survey through different methodology. 

Research showed that neighbouring territorial authorities had benchmarked other service providers and both Whakatāne and Ōpōtiki had moved to a new service provider SIL Research (several years ago) to deliver their Residents’ Surveys. In addition, other organisations including Trust Horizon utilise the services of SIL Research.  

Triennial Residents’ Survey 2023 – Methodology 
Considerable effort went into developing and carrying out the 2023 Residents’ Survey for Kawerau District Council with as many similarities to previous surveys to ensure accurate comparisons could be made. 

In addition, the survey aimed to meet the appropriate service activities that Council provides so that measures of performance could be made against previous survey results. 

However, there were several areas of the survey that required changes and in 2023, a general re-set has been undertaken with the survey in the following areas: 

1.    Timing 
The timing of the survey was shifted from late January and February, to later in the rating year between 8 May and 25 June 2023. This was to ensure that the survey was not competing with the start of the school and calendar year. 

2.    Scale of Answers
In the past, the survey was carried out with a three-scale answer (plus a not applicable/don’t know). This restricted residents as to the detail of their answer, particularly, if they were not fully satisfied with the services. This somewhat skewed the overall results. 

In 2023, Kawerau moved to a best-practice 10-scale answer model which is typically used by most Councils. This enabled a more robust opinion by residents completing the survey. 

3.    Methodology
In the past, the survey methodology was largely to collect responses by telephone, particularly landline. With mobile phones now common in most households, and landlines often now not in use: it meant that it was increasingly difficult to obtain a breadth of responses across different demographics. 

The results obtained via landline largely represent a specific demographic of people aged 65 years and older. The 2023 phone results were consistent with the landline results collected in earlier surveys. 

The SIL Research team have observed that utilising a mixed-mode of data collection has allowed the younger voices to come through in 2023, and there has been a significant change. Typically, younger people have ‘sharper opinions and comments’. 

In 2023, with the aim of collecting a broad spectrum of views, and meeting the demographics required, the survey methodology comprised:

• Surveys being delivered to 1,500 households (hardcopy); 
• Telephone surveys 
• Links via Social Media 
• Council-led links to the survey via Emails 
• Council-led additional paper surveys distributed to most schools 

Additional Information - Sampling Methods 
A combination of simple random sampling with quota sampling was used. Random sampling improved the accuracy and representativeness of the results by reducing sampling bias across the district. Respondents were randomly selected from the publicly available telephone directories within Kawerau District. The online invitation advertisement was randomly promoted to District residents. Hard-copy survey forms were sent to randomly selected Kawerau District households.

Age and ethnicity distribution were also monitored using quotas to ensure a sufficient number of participants was included in key demographic groups. 

For analysis, responses were also statistically weighted to reflect the age, gender and ethnicity group proportions as determined by the Statistics New Zealand 2018 Census for Kawerau District residents aged 18+.

4.     Benchmarking 
SIL Research conducts an independent representative National survey of Councils (all Councils, excluding Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin) to establish a series of benchmarks across a range of commonly tracked Council services. This allows Kawerau District Council to compare their survey results against a National average or New Zealand Benchmark (NZB). 

The National survey data is collected throughout the year so that annual results can be presented without seasonal bias. 

The benchmarking results in this report is based on 400 responses collected over 2023. 

The data is collected using a 1-10 scale.

The 2023 survey included additional demographic criteria, based on ethnicity, home ownership and annual household income.

Triennial Residents’ Survey 2023 - Results Overview 
As outlined, in 2023, the survey methodology was reviewed and adjusted to improve on previous sample limitations (i.e., introducing mixed method data collection, more inclusive samples, additional demographic details and criteria, and industry standard 1-10 rating scales). 

In combination, these changes represent a fairer and more accurate measure of resident sentiments. While those changes may, in part, explain greater variations in the current results compared to historical data, the adjustments made this year will allow for a more robust and representative baseline for ongoing evaluation and tracking moving forward.

In addition, as SIL Research points out in the Survey Overview, it is important to consider the impact of significant circumstances when evaluating satisfaction levels and ability of the Council to meet the needs of the community in 2022-2023. 

The cost of living in New Zealand has been steadily increasing, which has put financial pressure on Kawerau District residents. With local body elections in 2022, the electoral campaign and voting period likely brought local issues and concerns to the forefront of residents’ minds as they considered the forthcoming Council term and candidates up for election. 

Additionally, the impact of extreme weather events and heavy rainfalls continued challenging the District. Kawerau District Council operated in a demanding environment marked by these weather events, along with other factors, which had an impact on the community and potentially influenced perceptions of the Council’s performance. 

The full schedule of results are in the survey (attached). The overview of results follow:

Triennial Residents’ Survey 2023 – Main Findings  
Please note – not all Councils measure performance by way of the same activity groups. Where possible, the results have been benchmarked. 

For a summary of all the activity reviews please refer to the Executive Summary (pages 4-5), overall results (pages 6-7) and improvements (page 62). 

• Overall Satisfaction with Council – 70% 

Overall, Kawerau District’s residents expressed satisfaction with the Council services and facilities in their community, with a satisfaction rate of 70%. This satisfaction level exceeded the New Zealand benchmark average of 58%. 
Satisfaction differed significantly by age, with younger respondents being the least satisfied at 50%, compared to respondents aged 65-plus who rated satisfaction at 95%. 

• Council Services 14/19 or 74% rated 70% or higher  

The majority of evaluated Council services, 14 out of 19 (74%), achieved satisfaction ratings of 70% or higher, with nine services reaching very positive 80% satisfaction or above.

• Top-Rated Services in 2023 

The top-rated services in 2023 were the Kawerau cemetery (91%), District Library (90%), and rubbish collection (90%) and isite (88%).

• Areas for Improvement -  Water Quality 36% ‘brown water’ 

Water services rated particularly low in the 2023 survey with quality at 36% and delivery at 44%. 

Reasoning: The survey was carried out during the peak levels of the brown / discoloured water issues in April and May 2023. The level of dissatisfaction with this service correlates with the high number of service requests received. Council investigations in May and June confirmed that that the cause of the brown water was due to high levels of manganese in Te Wai o Marukaa | Pumphouse Spring which when combined with chlorine, oxidise and turn the water brown/rusty coloured. Testing and isolation of the source confirmed this and the water quality issues have since improved to a level of no brown water issues. 

• Areas for Improvement -  Dog Control 34% 

Another area of low satisfaction was dog control with a score of 34%. Comments outlined that the negative feedback was due to roaming dogs.

Reasoning: There are several reasons that this low level of satisfaction was recorded including that the Animal Control Services team had a period where it was under-resourced; and that the swarm of earthquakes (near the time of the survey) did attribute to higher-than-usual dog-roaming service requests. 

• Areas for Improvement -  Roads and Footpaths 

Other areas of concern (as mentioned in unprompted resident feedback) included roads (specifically potholes and poor quality) and footpaths requiring more maintenance and upgrades (partly due to uneven and hazardous surfaces). With the exceptionally wet weather, double the annual rainfall received in the months October 2022 to May 2023, this delayed the completion of footpath renewals and roading work, which is typically scheduled in the summer months. 

(See attached report for the full survey report). 

Future Considerations for Residents’ Surveys 

Completing the residents’ survey every three years, means there is a significant time – an entire electoral term – between surveys. To minimise this time lag, Council completes a customer feedback survey on a monthly basis, to inform the organisation with ongoing customer feedback. 

Many Councils are moving to carry out more frequent surveys of resident satisfaction which enables them to adjust, adapt and improve services more readily. These annual surveys could be carried out each quarter, which would enable ‘real time’ feedback for the Council from the community throughout the year. 

Council may wish to consider an earlier more focused survey to review the services where the performance is lower than usual. In particular, this would survey the areas of water quality and delivery, and the area of animal control, specifically dogs.