Office for Nuclear Regulation

Savanta conducted an annual survey for ONR, tracking stakeholder experiences, attitudes, and perceptions while identifying variations and trends across stakeholder groups. The resulting reports offer valuable insights into ONR’s regulatory performance and provide recommendations for continuous improvement towards strategic objectives.

The Challenge

Savanta was commissioned by ONR to conduct an annual survey that would track and assess the experience, attitudes and perceptions of their stakeholders and seek to identify variations and trends across their various stakeholder groups.

As part of this, ONR wanted to measure perceptions of their overall performance as a regulator against the delivery of their core mission and strategic themes, as well as capture more specific stakeholder insight on perceptions of ONR.

This included a need to identify key areas of strength and best practice, as well as potential risks, shortfalls, and priority areas of focus for operational improvement and strategic engagement in the future.

Our approach

Savanta took a mixed method approach to address ONR’s research objectives, first delivering a quantitative survey to a stakeholder database provided by ONR. In the first year of running this survey since taking over from another provider, we achieved the highest number of stakeholder responses since the survey began.

Recognising the need for qualitative data to better illustrate ONR’s key strengths, as well as potential areas for improvement, Savanta subsequently used the preliminary quantitative findings to develop a discussion guide for 16 in-depth interviews with stakeholders from across ONR’s key stakeholder groups.

In the second and most recent wave of this research, we also utilised Savanta’s vast experience of conducting stakeholder research, particularly in regulated environments, to provide benchmarking of ONR’s performance against other public sector organisations

The outcome

The resulting reports for 2022 and 2023 have been published on ONR’s website. These reports provide ONR itself, the wider nuclear sector and the public with a detailed picture of the organisation’s performance as a regulator, as well as recommendations on how the organisation can continue to improve year on year against its strategic objectives.

“We (ONR) commissioned Savanta in 2021 and since then they have successfully completed two stakeholder surveys on our behalf. The information gathered from the surveys has allowed us to understand what our stakeholders believe we do well and what areas they believe we need to focus on. The team at Savanta has been highly supportive and have provided us with their expert steer and advice throughout all stages of the process.”