The online survey will take approximately 15 minutes.

This survey is for members of standards committees, monitoring officers and other officers who work with standards committees. If you are not a member of any of these groups but you have general views you want to share about the work of the standards committees, then please do email Stephen.Greasley@manchester.ac.uk.

We want to find out about the work of the standards committees, find out what you think about ethics in your authority and we want to know about initiatives and practices that you think have been effective in supporting good conduct in your authority. The survey is confidential, your responses will not be linked to you personally or your authority, but the 'anonymised' data is likely to be used in research publications and Standards Board for England publications.

The survey asks if you have any examples in your authority of initiatives and practices which you think are effective in supporting good conduct. These do not need to be large or complex initiatives - we wish to find a mixture of examples from straightforward to the more elaborate.

For example, effective practice might relate to:

• how ethical standards are communicated throughout your authority, to parish or town councils (where relevant) and also to the local community;
• how the relationship between members and officers is managed (including designing, implementing and monitoring protocols on member-officer relations); and
• identifying areas of ethical risk in your authority.

These are just some possible areas of relevant practice and we hope that your responses will identify others that we have not considered.

If you do include one or more examples of effective practice, we may contact you for further details. When reporting and publicising examples of effectice practice the names of the authorities will be used, but of course consent will be sought before any authority is identified.