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Central government planning and housing consultations now provide the clearest test of whether consultation supports decision making or simply manages exposure to challenge. Since 2021, consultation has played a central role in planning reform. The issue is not frequency. It is design. Across multiple national consultations, the same failures recur. Digital First Without Judgement Central […]

Introduction In public decision making, it is common to treat volume as protection. More meetings. More survey returns. More submissions. The assumption is that a larger evidence base makes a decision safer under scrutiny. That assumption is often wrong. Scrutiny rarely turns on how much engagement you ran. It turns on whether your evidence base

Public Consultation Requirements Public sector leaders routinely face a deceptively simple question: does this change require formal public consultation? The answer matters enormously. Consult too little and you risk legal challenge, damaged trust and derailed projects; consult too much and you waste scarce resources on unnecessary process. This guide cuts through the complexity. It explains