[Matt Clack]

We completed a mystery shopping survey as part of a recent review about Overcrowding, looking at the quality of housing advice provided by the council. To ensure the feedback would be accepted (i.e we could have completed the project in-house, but would have opened ourselves to questions about our methodology) we engaged consultants to complete the survey for us. This was costly in both finance and time taken to oversee (and revise) their work, but provided some excellent evidence. We had originally planned to involve councillors in the mystery shopping, but that threw up a wide range of problems.

The consultant's final report can be found here, I think it was a useful exercise but took a disproportionate effort given the fact that this was only one part of the full review. A recommendation from our review was that the service repeats the mystery shopping to see if lesson learned had been implemented, which the Cabinet has agreed to.

Happy to discuss this further, let me know if there's anything specific you're interested in.

Cheers

Matt