Find your neighbourhood quirks and perks

Surrey-i is a free and easy-to-use tool, offering residents the chance to discover facts and figures about their neighbourhood. From the best performing schools, to local crime rates and care homes offering places for the elderly, Surrey-i provides a unique insight into the county.

The free site developed by Surrey County Council has a built-in map and by entering their postcode residents can find a host of other services and facilities in their community. These include the nearest schools and libraries as well as information on local doctors, hospitals, charities and councillors. Other features allow people to find their closest railway station, bus stop, dentist, nursery or beauty spot.

Surrey-i have now written to the ARA (8/2012) with the following information and requests.

"The main purpose of writing to you is to ask for your help and support with the further development of Surrey-i, Surrey County Council's data portal, which free of charge provides a wealth of intelligence, data, information and analysis about Surrey (you can find further information about Surrey-i here).

Surrey-i's focus remains on ensuring we are best placed to provide user led and focused content and to further develop our accessibility and user relevance; hence, we are currently:

• conducting an Information Needs Survey; this survey is very brief and more of 'general' information survey that asks about wider information needs; you can access the survey here

• conducting a Surrey-i User Survey; this survey explores the experiences and views of Surrey-i users you can access it via a link on Surrey-i's front page or here

• providing a pink 'Didn't find what you wanted?' button on every page in Surrey-i; this provides users with a better opportunity to explain their experience to us.

It is very important that we gather responses from as broader range of respondents as is possible, from across Surrey at Borough and District levels, and from Council and non-Council services, as well as from community organisations and the general public. The Surrey-i team would, therefore, be very grateful if you would take the time to complete the very brief surveys mentioned above and/or provide user feedback. In addition, we would also ask you to pass on this request (in part or whole) to other contacts, as you deem appropriate.

And finally, I have one other piece of Surrey-i content news to share with you; I am very pleased to say that the latest Census data release for Surrey is in Surrey-i, and you can go straight to it here."