Did the council’s recent budget poll really reflect public opinion?: Council’s budget survey ‘open to manipulation’ — and results could be skewed
- teessidetoday
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
The surveys that anyone could fill in — again and again & distort the results:
Why Hartlepool Borough Council's survey results may not be as trustworthy as they seem..
3rd Feb 2026
Hartlepool Borough Council’s recent public consultation on council tax and proposed service cuts has come under sharp scrutiny after The Teesside & Durham Post identified what appears to be a fundamental flaw in the way the survey was conducted — a weakness that could have materially skewed the results presented to councillors.
The consultation, which ran from 4 December 2025 to 4 January 2026, was carried out via the council’s online platform “Your Say”, with paper copies also made available in community buildings. In practice, however, its been found that every single one of the 262 responses recorded were submitted online, with no paper surveys being returned at all.
Council papers state that the survey online reportedly attracted 681 visits, meaning just over a third of those who accessed it went on to complete the questionnaire. The local council which in 2023 was declared an authority with no public confidence has subsequently relied on these 262 responses as a representative snapshot of public opinion when shaping its upcoming budget and council tax decisions.
Yet The Teesside & Durham Post has found that the council’s consultation system appears to have no effective safeguards to prevent individuals from submitting multiple surveys, including no evidence of any IP tracking, unique log-in requirements, or other basic verification measures to filter out duplicate or potentially fraudulent submissions. In theory, this means a single individual could complete the survey repeatedly time and again, amplifying their own views and distorting the overall picture presented to decision-makers.
This is particularly significant given the results that councillors are set to be shown at a Finance & Corporate Affairs Committee Meeting set to be held on the 10th February 2026, where, According to the agenda, respondents were broadly split on the council’s savings proposals — roughly one third in favour, one third against, and one third unsure. On council tax, however, a clear majority backed a freeze for 2026/27. Even when the question was then reframed to ask whether taxes should still be frozen if this meant deeper service cuts, a majority still supported keeping council tax down.
Those findings have already been cited in debates around Labour’s previous pledge to freeze council tax. But if the consultation could be easily manipulated through repeated submissions, the credibility of those results is now open to serious doubt.
The flaw also casts fresh light on earlier consultations held by Hartlepool Borough Council, where respondents appeared to strongly oppose to increasing council tax support to bring it back up to 100% for vulnerable applicants. At the time, councillors treated those responses as clear public backing for maintaining a 10% discount. Yet if the same survey system was used, there's seemingly no way of knowing whether those views actually genuinely reflected a broad cross-section of Hartlepool residents — or a smaller number of people submitting multiple responses in a bid to influence council policy.
Council officers have consistently argued that consultation is an important part of their budget process. The Medium Term Financial Plan explicitly notes that public views were sought on savings and council tax before final decisions were made. However, the absence of any meaningful verification or safeguards to ensure that people arent skewing the consultation results through the use of multiple submissions raises questions about whether the council can now truly claim to have consulted members of the public in a robust, reliable or statistically sound way.
Critics are now likely to argue that if the system allows for duplicate or coordinated submissions, the results are at best unreliable and at worst misleading. That, in turn, undermines the weight councillors should attach to the consultation when deciding whether to approve service cuts or a 4.99 per cent council tax rise — which the council’s own Section 151 officer has strongly recommended.
Hartlepool Borough Council has not, to date, set out what checks — if any — were in place to prevent repeat submissions, nor whether it intends to tighten its consultation procedures in future.
What's now beyond dispute is this: the consultation process, which has been used to justify major financial decisions affecting every resident, appears to rest on a system that cannot reliably distinguish between one person giving one view and one person giving the same view multiple times.
And the Teesside & Durham Post Exposed it once again !
