What Do We Think...or What Do They Want Us to Think?

SWT have prepared and printed out a Visitor Survey which amounts to a nine page questionnaire. The thing raises a whole collection of issues and reservations. Did they ever intend to submit this to visitors to Blacka Moor? First indications were that they did. But it’s not credible that even they would believe people would want to fill in this on the spot. But there’s no sign either of them being present on the moor handing them out for visitors to fill in later. They’ve half acknowledged this and then said they would correct the problem about this by sending it round to others, presumably including those who rarely visit. But who exactly are they sending it to and how do we know the survey’s sampling has any kind of validity? The thing stinks of the kind of manipulation that we’ve become accustomed to with this lot. The fact is they know the results they want the survey to show and they are capable of twisting the responses to get their desired result. This starts with the way they choose the questions but I for one don’t even trust them to report the returned papers accurately. Why? So many examples over the eight years of involvement in the RAG. Take the many times the RAG minutes have been carefully written to reflect favourably upon SWT; take the way they’ve tried to discredit and defame members of the RAG who disagreed with them. Look at the clumsy way they tried to show that cattle were grazing at Stanage Edge with no problems for the public – yet there are no cattle grazing there. I could go on. No they simply can’t be trusted to conduct a visitor survey. What anyway is its purpose? Is it intended to show the results to the Council or to potential funding providers who will take it at face value and ask no questions? Will it show that people support all the contentious parts of SWT’s management? This kind of murky exercise is what you get when you hand things over to deskbound managers who rarely visit the sites for which they are responsible. What an unholy mess.