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The first Tuesday Topic was written on November 26th, 2003. It was entitled Consultation – or just another survey? and began an uninterrupted series of short, 600-800 word, briefs covering virtually every aspect of public engagement and consultation we found interesting, and possibly quite a few that weren’t!

The answer to this riddle is that they have both concluded that Referendums can be inconvenient. It’s all really quite confusing isn’t it. Asking the public to give a view should, of course, be a no-brainer – and the more important the issue, the less one might imagine this to be controversial. Yet the hapless Greek premier

The past decade has seen a largely unquestioned view that public policy should be evidence-based. And who could question it anyway? It seems so obvious. But it has not been a completely smooth journey. There have been times when it feels more like policy-based evidence-making, as researchers have desperately sought for data that can be

When the Government cancelled the Forestry consultation earlier this year, the Prime Minister is reported to have complained that ‘we hadn’t done enough pitch-rolling’. Despite mystifying non-cricket followers, he was probably spot-on. The road to consultation has two distinct aspects – procedural and substantive. Organisers of consultations these days are quite familiar with the necessary

Growth is in; the Government needs it badly, and the country as a whole is passionate to avoid another recession. It is the backdrop for the fascinating debate on the new Planning Guidance and its presumption in favour of sustainable development. In the meantime, 37 Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) in England are gearing up, and

We can all count the commentators queuing up to demand that we have more dialogue with the thousands of the greedy or disaffected who took part in last week’s destructive riots. There is little room for disagreement there. But it begs the question – what will these dialogues be about?

There may well be too many consultations. And they often overlap. But in truth they just reflect the reality that decision-making is itself complex with interdependencies that make it unusual for any subject to be placed in a watertight box without being influenced by or itself influencing other decisions.

The Government would like to achieve a culture-change. It feels – rightly or wrongly – that people are fed up with rather too many public servants beavering away doing bureaucratic tasks of various descriptions, whilst the rest of the private-sector economy shoulders the burden of paying for them. This is why we hear a lot