AI consultation analysis: Bath and North East Somerset Council parking charge proposals
Discover how Bath and North East Somerset Council used AI to efficiently analyse 18,102 free text comments in response to their parking charge proposals consultation in just a few days.
The challenge
In summer 2024, Bath and North East Somerset Council consulted on a range of proposals to review emissions-based car park charges and understand community views on tackling and improving air quality in the area. The consultation generated 4,322 individual responses and 18,102 free text comments. The sheer volume of responses highlighted both the emotive nature of the proposals and the need for an efficient solution to cope with the volume of data.
Faced with the task of manually analysing thousands of comments, the Council sought an efficient solution to identify key themes and summarise feedback. The challenge was to process the data quickly and accurately to meet reporting deadlines.
To this end, the council commissioned The Future Fox to analyse their data.
The solution
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In just 3 days, The Future Fox used their cutting-edge AI technologies to produce a set of reports for the 11 questions asked in the consultation. Each of the reports was provided in easy-to-edit .xlsx and .docx format, to be easily added to their final Outcome Report.
What was included in the reports?
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Specific and top-level themes and locations in the answers to each question
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Summaries of all comments over 50 words
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A 3-page summary report for each question, with both quantitative and qualitative summaries
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A ‘summary of summaries’ report, identifying all of the headline issues across the consultation
Thanks to verified accuracy as well as the easy-to-edit and copy/paste formats, the council was able to easily incorporate the results directly into their final report. This saved the council around 6 weeks of time, freeing up the team to work on critical issues rather than processing data.
What’s more, the results made for a much more detailed public-facing report than would have been possible normally, raising the standards of communication and accountability to the public.
“The ability to be able to analyse and summarise key themes across 18k individual items of feedback allowed us to meet challenging deadlines and deliver the outcomes on time. Without this analysis, it would have taken significant officer resource many weeks and not provided the same level of accuracy and consistency as we achieved using The Future Fox.”
- Andrew Dunn, Team Manager - Parking Services, Bath and North East Somerset Council
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