Surveys and audits of local provision

Open space studies rest on a simple discipline: find out what exists, ask people what they use and value, and record both in a form that can survive scrutiny. Since the days when the National Playing Fields Association began counting pitches, the field has developed a settled repertoire of survey methods. None of them is exotic. What makes them defensible is care in execution and honesty about response rates, sample sizes and the limits of what a questionnaire can tell you.

The classic structure of an assessment, set out in government guidance and carried through from PPG17 to its successors, pairs a quantitative audit of supply with a survey of demand. The two halves must be capable of being set against each other, site by site and catchment by catchment, as explained in how a PPG17 open space assessment worked.

Site-by-site audit sheets

The foundation of any study is the field survey. Every site, from a district park to a pocket of amenity grassland, is visited and recorded on a structured audit sheet. The sheet typically covers size, boundaries and access points, primary function, ancillary facilities such as benches, paths and lighting, evidence of use, and condition scored against defined criteria. Quality scoring is often weighted and hierarchical, so that the aspects that matter most to users carry the greatest influence in the final score.

The virtue of the audit sheet is consistency. If every assessor applies the same criteria to every site, the results can be aggregated, mapped and compared, and a local authority can identify its best and worst provision on a like-for-like basis. The weakness is that scores reflect a snapshot. A site visited on a wet Tuesday in February may look different from the same site in summer, and good practice acknowledges this by recording the date and conditions of each visit. Field data then feeds directly into the catchment work described in mapping open space and catchments.

Postal and doorstep surveys

To understand demand, the traditional instruments are the postal questionnaire and the doorstep survey. The postal survey reaches a large sample at modest cost and lends itself to comparison between wards, age groups and user types. Its reputation problem is response rate: a poorly designed postal survey can return single-digit percentages, too thin to support any claim about what a population thinks.

Response-rate discipline is therefore central to the method. A long questionnaire sent out once with no follow-up will underperform. Good practice keeps the questionnaire interesting and clearly relevant, provides pre-paid returns, issues reminders, and treats the achieved response as a fact to be reported, not buried. In the experience of practices such as Ashley Godfrey Associates, response levels of 35 per cent or more on a twelve-page postal survey are not exceptional when the design is handled by someone who understands survey method.

The doorstep survey, by contrast, samples households face to face. It costs more per response but achieves much higher completion rates and allows the interviewer to explain questions and probe where answers are unclear. It also reaches people who never reply to post. Used alongside a postal survey, it provides a check on whether the postal respondents differ systematically from the population as a whole.

Club surveys for sports provision

Sports provision, and playing pitches in particular, demands its own instrument: the club survey. Every known club using every pitch in the study area is contacted and asked about membership numbers, teams fielded by age group and gender, home fixtures, training demand, unmet demand and views on pitch quality. Without this data, an assessment of pitch supply is guesswork, because the same grass pitch may host no matches at all or be overplayed every weekend.

The technique is documented in detail in how a playing pitch strategy is built. The discipline here is coverage: a club omitted from the survey is a block of demand invisible to the strategy, so the register of clubs is checked against governing-body lists, bookings records and site visits. Club surveys also reveal latent demand, teams that could be fielded if facilities existed, which pure supply-side audits cannot see.

From raw answers to evidence

Raw survey returns are not yet evidence. The first step is validation: removing spoiled or duplicate returns, checking that samples are representative, and reporting the response rate openly. The second is analysis that respects the structure of the data, with cross-tabulations by area and population group rather than headline percentages alone. Where quality audit scores are combined into a single value per site, the method of combination must be stated so that others can reproduce it.

The third step is triangulation. A finding is defensible when the audit, the household survey and the club data all point the same way: a park that scores poorly on quality, is criticised in the questionnaire and shows displaced use to a neighbouring town is a genuine problem, not a statistical artefact. Work of this kind underpins the approaches described in community consultation, done properly, where quantitative surveys are paired with focus groups and workshops that reach people the standard tactics miss.

The same philosophy extends to the youngest users. Questionnaires designed for completion by children, developed with local authorities and play organisations, ask about play in language children recognise. National benchmark work by Fields in Trust, drawing on guidance at fieldsintrust.org, gives local authorities a reference point against which to set their own locally determined standards, as discussed in how children's play provision is assessed.

An evidence base built this way has a further quality: it can be repeated. Because the audit sheet, the questionnaire and the club survey are documented instruments, a later study can rerun them and measure change. That is what turns a one-off survey exercise into a monitoring tool, capable of tracking whether provision is improving year on year.