Wandsworth Electoral Registration Service

Four time winner of the Charter Mark award

Electoral Registration Service staff were delighted when they received news in January 2006 of being awarded the prestigious Charter Mark for the fourth time. This award was first achieved in 1996, when Wandsworth were then the only Electoral Service in the United Kingdom to hold it and this continued until 1999. Since then other electoral services have made and continue to make successful applications, several after seeking guidance from Wandsworth on its service delivery practice.

What is Charter Mark?
Charter Mark is an award by Central Government in recognition of a service that demonstrates excellence and high quality customer-focused service delivery. The service is assessed against six pre-defined criteria that are further divided into 63 sub-elements. The scheme requires the submission of an on-line application in which the applicant details the evidence of excellence in service delivery held by the service against each of the sub-elements. A maximum of three items of evidence is provided at a corporate level with a maximum of a further three being provided by the individual service.

An appointed assessor then assesses the supporting evidence and the service itself during a full one-day visit. During the visit the assessor meets service users, staff and relevant partners as part of the process to test the validity of the application. The Charter Mark award lasts for three years, and the Service opted in 2007 to pursue a three year rolling programme of annual appraisal reviews, after completing the yearly surveillance visit in 2006. The Rolling Programme assessment looks at a third of all criteria each year plus any partial compliance areas and, if successful, rolls forward the award for another three years. 

Our experience
The Electoral Registration Service submitted its Charter Mark rolling programme year 1 application on 19 November 2007 and the assessment day was held on 5 December 2007. The success of the Electoral Registration Service application was confirmed on 17 December 2007.

At the end of the assessment day the assessor held a detailed review meeting with staff, in which he conveyed his views of the Service, based on the evidence provided and his experience during the day.

He gave very positive information from his consultation with stakeholders, where he had received comments such as "high quality Service", "good on communication", "good on outreach work", "good team spirit" and said that he received no negative comments in the feedback he received.

He also stated that the Service set high standards in keeping with the Wandsworth culture, and worked well with internal partners. He considered that the improvements to the Service Citizens Charter and website were very well thought out, and in particular that the introduction of the sign language facility on the website was a step forward and an obvious improvement. He also commended the Service's Equality Impact Assessment and the follow up work which was being arranged and set up ahead of the 2008 GLA elections taking place. He was also impressed by how the evidence was presented (i.e. the record-keeping system used).

If you would like further information you can download a copy of the full report that went to the Corporate Resources Overview and Scrutiny Committee on 16 January 2008.

 Committee report (44 kb)

Year 2 of the rolling improvement programme is due to be implemented before 3 January 2009, and during that time the Service is fully committed to continuing to comply with the requirements of the Charter Mark Standard.