Jersey-born pilot devises new polling platform for blue sky thinking - Jersey Evening Post
by James Sharp · Jersey Evening PostPosted inNews
Jersey-born pilot devises new polling platform for blue sky thinking
by James Sharp 11 June 202610 June 2026
Share this:
A JERSEY-BORN commercial pilot has created a new online polling platform to rival YouGov in an attempt to encourage political engagement in the Island.
Former Victoria College student James Le Cuirot took more than six month to build the website, which aims to gauge public opinion on current affair issues.
Islanders are invited to visit the website – which can be found at perspective.je – to answer daily questions on a variety of hot-button topics.
Previous questions have included “should Jersey introduce a minimum wage increase to £16 per hour?” and “should Jersey hold a referendum on whether to pursue full independence from the UK?”
Mr Le Cuirot said the idea stemmed from his personal use of the international market research and data analytics platform YouGov.
“I had a sort of realisation that although Jersey is a small island, it has a lot of opinion”, he said. “And there’s a lot of discussion around politics, housing and the cost of living – something we have certainly seen in the last couple of months with the election.
“But despite that, there is no single place that is really capturing what people think here in a structured, ongoing way – so I wanted to try to build that.
“I thought I would try to create something that was a bit more substantial and meaningful, rather than a one-off poll or a government consultation-style questionnaire that you tend to see land in your inbox and forget about”.
Remarkably, the 26-year-old said he had been working on the platform for six-to-ten months during the intermittent periods of structured rest allocated to him as a pilot.
“The company I work for is based in the UK, but we fly an aircraft that’s based in Jersey,” he said. “So that’s kind of the day job – which is great fun – but the other side of it is that we get a decent amount of time off to work on other things.
“I work on a few other projects related to software, mostly in the field of aviation, so this is a bit of a new branch towards a politics theme.
“It’s something I’m personally very interested in; as a local Jersey-born and bred person I have a big, vested interest in the Island and the success of the Island.
“So I wanted to try to create something that might go a little bit towards achieving that”.
He emphasised that poll data will “always stays within our own system” and “never be shared or sold to third parties.”
“Data protection is something I take very seriously,” the 26-year-old said. “Really, this platform is only going to be successful if people trust it.
“The big thing is obviously maintaining the security of the data and making sure that anonymity is always maintained for the people that participate.
“New users only need to provide a functional email address and provide the parish they live in, as well as the month and year that they’re born so we can allocate them to an age bracket.
“The focus is then on just creating an element of discussion around the results and seeing if there are any interesting differences that crop up from different demographic groups.”
Mr Le Cuirot argues that his platform provides a useful counter-point to a political climate dense with “misinformation” and “echo chambers”.
He said: “Ultimately it is about creating places where people can discuss their ideas, but also have those ideas grounded with some kind of factual information.
“We want to look at what the topical issues are day-to-day and ask questions about those, [and] one of the really nice features that we have is the ability for users to submit their own questions.
“So if there is something that is on your mind that you would like to put forward to the user base you can submit that to us, we will review it, and if it’s suitable we will push that out”.
Related
Read the latest free supplements
Read the Homelife, Connect and a whole host of other subjects like ranging from cycling to travel.
View all our latest supplements now >