For more than 200,000 people locally the answer is, the local council.
Within a couple of weeks voters will be going to the polls to elect councillors in Portsmouth, Fareham, Gosport and Havant.
For every household in these areas, the councils spend an average of £860 of the public's cash a year through a combination of the council tax and government grants to local authorities.
Issues such as parking charges, rubbish collection, and council tax bills are guaranteed to get most people hot under the collar,
but most people, when they actually get the chance to do something about the things that wind them up, choose instead to stay at home.
In the last local elections, 215,000 of us made it to our local polling stations, but even more – 226,000 of us – didn't cast a vote and might well stay at home again on May 1.
Voting doesn't only potentially make the difference between being charged more or less tax, it could affect who cares for your grandparents in a residential home, how often your recycling is collected, and where the next housing development is built.
Campaigners are pounding the streets, knocking on doors and posting election leaflets, hoping people will listen to their message. And key battlegrounds are emerging.
For two of our local councils – Portsmouth and Gosport – the balance of power is on a knife-edge and the leading parties could be overhauled by their rivals.
In Portsmouth, the Tories are mounting a battle to topple the ruling Lib Dems, and across the harbour Gosport's Conservatives are bringing out the big guns in a bid to swipe power from Labour.
Last year, leader of Portsmouth City Council Gerald Vernon-Jackson clung on to his seat by a slim 37 votes, showing that every vote counts. And in Gosport Labour held on to Rowner by just nine votes.
Professor Sir Robert Worcester, founder of the MORI polling and research organisation, told The News: 'Nine votes. That's not just quite close. That's extremely close. It's cigarette paper close. It's close enough not just to to have a second recount, but a third recount too.'
If Gosport's Conservatives can change just one seat from red or yellow to blue they could seize power from the current Lib/Lab pact.
Mark Wallace of the non-party campaign group Taxpayers' Alliance said that people had to turn up to polling stations to demonstrate to politicians that they cared about how their money was spent.
'We want less council tax and better services,' he said. 'We want to be treated like customers, and any company behaving like a council would have lost its customers and gone out of business.
'Even if 60 per cent of us went to the ballot box just to spoil our papers it would send a strong message that we care enough to turn up.
'This is our chance to remind councillors that we're watching and if they don't change things we'll throw them out.'