Comments on: Effective Consultation

By: Glyn

Glyn — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:33:21 +0000

They should consult early in the process, if this means views change as a result of the consultation, they should not be afraid to re-consult after they have modified their intentions.

By: Glyn

Glyn — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:23:27 +0000

The six consultation criteria

1. Consult widely throughout the process, allowing a minimum of 12 weeks for written consultation at least once during the development of the policy.

Using Software patents as an example, the patent office consultation was only brought to the attention of patent lawyers, and not highlighted to programs. This produced skewed result as you would expect.

2. Be clear about what your proposals are, who may be affected, what questions are being asked and the time scale for responses.

Time scale can be shorter than government recommended time scales. Some departments are very good at expanding the period of time for responses when they realise there is more interest in responding, than they originally expected.

By: Glyn

Glyn — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:39:16 +0000

Along with the comments Sheila has made, I would say that all consultations should be published under non restrictive copyright licences in a single, standard format so that external organisations can group them together and provide innovative services for them, similar to the way that theyworkforyou.com takes material from Hansard and other sources and presents it in a user friendly format. It is not necessary for the government to spend a lot of money producing a fancy web site - if they make the documents readily accessible, in a consistent format then external organisations will be able to provide useful services with that data without having to do large amounts of work hunting it down or working out how to extract the useful information from the non standard ways the consultations are presented.

By: Sheila

Sheila — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:24:21 +0000

If the Government truly considers consultation to be an integral part of policy development then they should make consultations easier to find and do more to make the public aware of them. For example, by publishing all Government consultation documentation, etc. in one, central location (online), in a standard format. This shouldn’t make it any harder for individual departments, quangoes, etc. to publicise or direct people to their consultations.

By: Becky Hogge

Becky Hogge — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 17:42:42 +0000

I suppose you could argue that if money/resource were a significant barrier to consultation responding, then those who stood to gain financially from specific outcomes would be more likely than those who simply cared about policy…

By: Becky Hogge

Becky Hogge — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 17:29:32 +0000

Consultation fatigue is a huge problem for us!

By: Becky Hogge

Becky Hogge — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 17:27:41 +0000

On substance, consultation responses vary wildly. ORG has had good experiences (Nuffield) and bad (BBC iPlayer).

By: David Harris

David Harris — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:54:01 +0000

Typically I learn of a consultation through a stakeholder group; search engines such as Google and the blogs of key opinion formers or commentators.

By: Harry Metcalfe

Harry Metcalfe — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:45:05 +0000

While it is almost certainly the case that a debate lacking focus would not be productive, it is also the case that the parameters set for consultations should not be so limiting as to prevent a full discussion of the relevant points.

It is, for example, important that respondents be permitted to disagree with a proposed policy change completely, rather than being forced to choose the lesser of two evils. We really need an example of this! Anything that says “This is not a time to revisit the argument, we need to move forward…” is a likely candidate!

By: David Harris

David Harris — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:43:22 +0000

An additional point here is tha5tmanystakeholder groups have fairly or very limited resources. By breaking down consultations into bite sized chunks consultation fatigue is prone to set in and there is an issue of failing to grasp the overall scope of the consultation.
My observation is that this is particularly problematic for small grass-roots organisations.