St Ives Town Deal
Public Engagement Report Published

It is worth restating how this consultation was managed:

The proposals stated: “Our Objectives for St Ives - Support the health, wellbeing and aspirations of residents in life and work” yet the word resident was only used 10 times whilst visitor/s was used 21 times. Their needs were supreme in this.

The “Engagement Questionnaire”, the only way for residents to have our say, given the secrecy around Drop In Events, was heavily geared to visitors & insulting to residents. It appeared to be a loosely tailored CORMAC standard set of questions, which allowed for no nuance in its findings. e.g. nobody writing it can ever have tried to cycle along Fore Street to the Co-Op. It included many leading questions & only allowed for quantitative, not qualitative data

It was heavily visitor centric in that 13 of the 27 questions directly prioritised visitors to the town. e,g. 9. “What is your main reason for visiting St Ives?” (No “I live here.” Option given.)

11 of the 27 questions could be answered with “I live here.”, which is not an option & makes the question meaningless for Downlong residents. Not one question was specific to Downlong residents & the impact on our lives – this because the authors do not live here and are oblivious to it, as the whole team have demonstrated. In fact, the way post codes were collected from respondents means that Downlong residence was deliberately obscured, lumping our responses with a large number unaffected by Wharf Road restrictions, so diluted.

The questionnaire offered scant opportunity to explain the impact on residents – only agree how nice it will be when we are kept out of the way. There were times (e.g. midday Saturday 2nd December – a peak time for those that work weekdays 9-5 one might think) the page which should show & download the proposal boards had crashed and was unavailable.

The display board s are available here.

The survey is available here.

Find out on our website here how the questionnaire was closed early & the links led to the Truro Town Deal website.