Produced by The Community Appraisal Project Steering Group with The Community Council of Devon, Totnes Town Council, South Hams District Council & Devon County Council. 1999

The Totnes Appraisal is a community project, a survey which was designed to give the residents of Totnes a chance to have a say about their town: its shops and buses; its river and parks; its business and industry; and its leisure and art facilities, and other issues.

Most of the questions were written by a small group of local volunteers, using comments gathered during a public meeting and follow-up consultations with local groups. The same volunteers have also produced this report.

On the professional side, it was supported by the Community Council of Devon, Totnes Town Council, South Hams District Council, Devon County Council and National Lottery Charities Board. It was also funded by European 5b Fund.

An 18-page questionnaire was sent to every household in Totnes in January 1999 and, in total, 1,518 households (2,626 people) returned it with their answers.

This represents an encouraging response rate of about 40%.

Four out of ten households in Totnes took part in this project.

This is an important question. If the answer was ‘yes’, we could now assume that we found out what "the people of Totnes think" even though only 40% of households returned their answers.

This can be an Achilles heel of any survey, including ours. However, the depth of feeling and positive attitude shown almost universally by so many respondents demand this survey to be taken seriously.

No! We got together to produce a decent piece of work. We really wanted to find out where we stand before we can start thinking about what to do next.

All the views are included, all diverging dreams and aspirations represented. Where relevant, we have also given statistics, included individual comments, and hinted at possible courses of action to deal with the most pressing issues.

It is important to be clear about the function of the report.

• It does give an idea of the opinions of Totnes residents on a range of issues of local concern, but it does not (nor could it ever hope to) capture the nuances and intricacies of everyone’s views.
• It does yield results which local government representatives should take into account when making decisions on local issues, but it does not order local councillors to act.
• It does give local people and groups ideas about ‘hot’ issues and how they might be tackled, but it does not provide a blueprint for what should be done.