Lancashire is about to look very different. From April 2028, the county's 15 existing councils will be replaced with four brand-new unitary authorities: North Lancashire, South Lancashire, Fylde Coast, and Pennine Lancashire. It's the biggest reorganisation of local government in the region for over half a century, and it touches everything from bin collections to social care for well over a million residents.
When consultancy Cratus Group needed to give Lancashire's communities a genuine voice in that process, they turned to Give My View, LandTech's community engagement platform. The results speak for themselves: over 13,000 people, more than 346,000 individual answers, and nearly 68,000 pieces of written feedback, with health and care services coming out as residents' clear top priority.
Here's how it happened, and what it tells us about doing large-scale consultation properly.
Local Government Reorganisation isn't a small ask. Under the old two-tier system, county and district councils split responsibility for everything from housing and planning through to social care and highways. Under the new set-up, each of the four new authorities takes over the lot, delivering every service in its area.
That's a lot of change to explain to well over a million people, spread across towns as different as Lancaster and Blackpool, Preston and Pendle. Getting meaningful, representative feedback at that scale is a genuinely difficult brief, especially when you need answers that hold up as evidence and not just noise.
Give My View was built to make exactly this kind of large-scale, high-stakes engagement feel less like a form to fill in and more like a conversation worth having. Rather than a static survey, residents worked through a guided, visual set of questions covering everything from how important parks and green spaces are to them, through to their priorities for how any new council should operate day to day.
The format did its job. Nearly 12,000 people rated the importance of local health and care services alone, and the vast majority stuck with the survey all the way through some genuinely searching questions about affordable housing, transport, and community support.
The qualitative side matters just as much. Almost 68,000 individual pieces of written feedback gave Cratus Group and the councils involved a rich, quotable evidence base, not just percentages, when it comes to justifying decisions and shaping how the new authorities communicate with residents from day one.
The survey asked residents to rate the importance of over 20 different council services and priorities, and the results gave a clear picture of where people want the new authorities to focus. Good health and care services topped the list by some distance (4.89 out of 5), followed by consistent and reliable services (4.77), value for money (4.76), and clear and accountable decision-making (4.75).
At the other end of the scale, benefits, financial advice, and support came out lowest (3.54), with environmental sustainability and climate action (3.85) and affordable housing (3.84) also rating comparatively lower, though still solidly important to residents. For the new councils, that's a fairly unambiguous steer: get the day-to-day essentials right first, and residents will judge everything else against that baseline.
Whatever your view on Local Government Reorganisation, the Lancashire project shows what's possible when community engagement is built for scale from the ground up. Thirteen thousand voters and nearly 350,000 answers isn't a token consultation exercise, it's a genuine evidence base, and one that will likely be referenced as the new authorities bed in over the coming two years.
For anyone running a consultation, whether that's a council reorganisation, a housing development, or a renewables project, the lesson is the same: give people an engaging way to respond, ask questions that actually matter to them, and be prepared to publish what they tell you, even when it's not the answer you expected.
Find out more about how Give My View can support your next community consultation here.
If you're looking for support blending Give My View's digital offering with on-the-ground engagement and political advice, contact Cratus Group on hello@cratus.co.uk.