Thirty years ago this week, a young man walked out on to the streets of Southwark in south London. He was from MORI, and was undertaking the first study the organisation ever undertook for a local authority. After a few hours, Brian Goss-chalk returned to MORI and tore up the corporate reputation questionnaire which had been adopted from our work for companies such as Shell and Unilever. He drafted a set of questions that reflected the issues residents said mattered - whether or not the council was providing value for money, and how it was running the area as a whole, rather than simply whether they liked it. In 2001, in the first exercise where all councils in England recorded how residents felt about their performance and their priorities, many of those MORI questions lived on, and still do in the Place survey which all English authorities now undertake every two years.
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