Goodbye tick-box; hello your honour! – Will the new Cabinet Office Consultation Principles’ attempt to end the tick-box habit result in a bigger role for the Courts?

The infamous tick-box gets the blame for a lot. In the world of consultation, it is a regular refrain, with two different meanings.

One is the criticism that the consultation isn’t a really serious attempt to listen at all – the consultor is just ‘going through the motions’, because the organisation is expected to undertake such an exercise. In other words, it’s just a tick-box exercise. The other is a complaint that instead of a genuine dialogue, what happens is a bureaucratic process with mechanistic adherence to a list of requirements, regardless of their relevance to the circumstances of the moment. It’s just a tick-box exercise!