1.] The aim of the project is simply to protect and improve the quality of life in Horspath.

2.] The method used is to ask every section of the community about their positive and negative views of the village today, and their hopes, fears, and wishes for the future.

3.] On the basis of the views expressed, a Horspath Parish Plan Questionnaire has been designed to be answered by every household, to establish an objective measure of how important and how widespread are the views expressed by the sample groups who have contributed questions for inclusion in the Questionnaire. During the next few weeks volunteers from each road in the village will call on their neighbours to deliver a copy of the Questionnaire to each household, and to collect the completed Questionnaires from them. In South Oxfordshire alone 25 other villages are also producing Parish Plans.

4.] Only those questions on topics, which residents have asked for, are included in the Questionnaire. Very few questions, which anyone has asked for, have been totally excluded, and then only for technical reasons.

5.] To reduce the amount of work required to analyse the answers to the questions, the Horspath Parish Plan Questionnaire has been professionally designed, so that the answers can be read by a computerised scanning system, to produce a statistical data base.

6.] To some extent, the raw statistics derived from the Questionnaire answers will represent an objective statement of the ‘wish list’ not only of the majority, but also of some minority groups of people living in Horspath. The Parish Council, District Council and County Councils have all approved of the design of this Questionnaire and will accept these results as an authoritative and objective statement of what people in Horspath really want for the future of the village, and will take these wishes into account when major decisions are made.

To be wholly believable, as a truly inclusive and representative view, about 90% of the households in Horspath need to answer the Questionnaire.

7.] Postal surveys achieve only about a 20% response; national elections sometimes involve only 34% of the population; but Parish Plan Questionnaires, delivered and collected by neighbours, normally achieve a more than 80%, and often a more than 90% response.

8.] However, the raw statistics will provide only part of the answer to the main question of "What do people in Horspath really want?", and so they will be posted on the Horspath Village website and on the noticeboards, with some helpful analysis and interpretations of what they mean, for people to think about the facts, before attending a Public Meeting in the Village Hall, with free refreshments, to discuss them and prioritise some actions by the community.

9.] The Parish Plan Steering Group will hopefully receive many offers of help from new volunteers, who will fill in the response slip at the back of the Questionnaire, and together, this larger group of volunteers will convert the ‘wish list’ expressed by the answers to the Questionnaire into some practical proposals listed as an ‘Action Plan’, to be sent to the Parish Council, District Council and County Council.

10.] The statistics will be also used to support grant applications for village facilities which Horspath would otherwise be unable to afford, for example, better sports facilities.

11.] The Action Plan will form part of the Parish Plan, which will be published and sent free to every household as a record of all that has been achieved by the project, and it will be posted in much more detail on the Horspath Village website.

12.] Horspath urgently needs this Parish Plan in 2008, because it is today a village under threat from government plans which sadly do not place much value on villages or village life.