Sandwell Council: Budget Consultation and Residents’ Survey
Sandwell Council commissioned M·E·L Research to undertake a large-scale consultation with residents to inform the Council’s budget-setting process for 2026/27. The research was designed to provide robust evidence on residents’ priorities, views on local services, and attitudes towards potential approaches for balancing the Council’s budget in a challenging financial climate.
The wider context for the work was significant financial pressure facing local government, alongside increasing demand for services linked to the cost-of-living crisis, inflation and rising operational costs. The Council also needed to balance statutory service obligations with ambitions to invest in town centres, affordable housing, community safety, infrastructure and wider regeneration activity across Sandwell’s six towns.
The Council sought to understand:
Which strategic priorities residents considered most important.
How residents ranked specific service and investment priorities.
The extent to which residents were experiencing financial pressures themselves.
Residents’ appetite for different budget-balancing measures, including council tax increases, service reductions and charging approaches.
Reactions to a range of proposed savings and transformation initiatives.
The subject matter involved several sensitivities, particularly around financial hardship, council tax increases and service reductions. It was therefore important that the research design enabled residents to engage with complex budget issues in an accessible and balanced way, while ensuring the findings were statistically robust and representative of the borough population.
Approach
M·E·L Research designed and delivered a borough-wide quantitative consultation programme using face-to-face interviewing with residents across Sandwell.
Research design and questionnaire development
The questionnaire was designed collaboratively with Sandwell Council to ensure the consultation addressed both strategic priorities and specific budget-setting considerations.
The survey incorporated:
Contextual information explaining the Council’s financial position and statutory responsibilities.
Priority-ranking exercises across key Council themes.
Attitudinal measures relating to financial pressures and council tax.
Testing of proposed savings and efficiency measures.
Open-ended questions to capture residents’ reasons for prioritising particular services and themes.
The structure ensured residents had sufficient information to provide informed responses while maintaining neutrality in the presentation of options.
Quantitative fieldwork
M·E·L Research completed 1,101 face-to-face interviews with randomly selected Sandwell residents during October and November 2025.
A stratified random location sampling approach was used:
Census Output Areas were randomly selected within wards to act as sampling points.
Quotas were applied at ward level by age and gender to ensure the sample reflected the demographic profile of the borough.
The final dataset was weighted by ward, age and gender using 2021 Census data to ensure representativeness.
The achieved sample size provided a borough-level confidence interval of +/-2.95% at the 95% confidence level, enabling robust reporting of resident opinion at an overall borough level.
Sample coverage
The achieved sample included residents from all six Sandwell towns:
Oldbury
Rowley Regis
Smethwick
Tipton
Wednesbury
West Bromwich
The sample also achieved representation across:
Age groups
Gender
Ethnic backgrounds
Housing tenure
Employment status
Residents with and without chronic health conditions
Priority ranking and trade-off exercises
The consultation included a series of structured ranking exercises requiring residents to prioritise:
Council-wide strategic themes
Local neighbourhood improvements.
Health and wellbeing priorities.
Economic and environmental priorities.
Potential approaches to balancing the budget.
Residents were also asked to rank potential spending and charging approaches in order of preference, enabling the Council to understand relative support and opposition across different budget options.
Qualitative coding and thematic analysis
Open-ended responses explaining why residents prioritised certain themes were analysed using thematic coding techniques.
This enabled M·E·L Research to identify:
Key drivers behind resident priorities.
Common concerns relating to safety, housing, health and economic opportunities.
Differences in motivations across demographic groups and geographic areas.
Thematic “net” categories were developed to group related comments into higher-level themes such as:
Community wellbeing
Child development and welfare
Health and wellness access
Jobs and economic development
Service quality and fairness
Outputs
M·E·L Research delivered a comprehensive reporting package to support Sandwell Council’s budget-setting and communications processes.
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