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You’re talented! You’re experienced! You know your way around the labyrinth of public services and the bureaucracies that surround them. You’ve learnt how to deal with the public and realise that there are times when you can call them ‘stakeholders’ … and rather more occasions when you can’t!

Local Authorities use them. Some NHS Trusts use them; Police have them and umpteen other public bodies have found them useful from time to time. In the private sector, electronic panels are increasingly used for customer consultation – and the market research industry has long seen them as a great way to build demographically-representative stratified

By our calculations, the Central Government has launched 80 consultations in its five months of office. These are in addition to its high-profile request for ideas on the deficit-reduction. Given where the administration lies in the policy-making cycle, and that these figures exclude major high-profile reviews kicked off in the Coalition Agreement, this appears a

he Chancellor didn’t have many surprises. Almost all the key messages of the Spending Review had been well and truly leaked and most public agencies watching his speech did so, not to find out what would happen to their budgets, but just to check that it wasn’t going to be worse than forecast. Although the

Just when you thought that life was becoming simpler, and the Coalition’s great experiment in localism was about to begin, twenty-four new organisations appear – and they will probably consult like mad … Surely not, you say!

Someone attending an Institute training course recently became very depressed. What’s the use, she said, of learning how to do things properly when all my budget has been removed and I’m required to consult thousands of people without spending any money?

Donald Rumsfeld was ridiculed for using this expression, but it is a useful way to look at the state of uncertainty affecting so many public bodies right now. The Coalition Government has been in power for seven months, and is now starting to put its ideas into practice. Not all require legislation and, when they

Eyebrows were raised in Northern Ireland recently when the Minister for Education extended the closing date of a significant consultation on her strategy for early years services for children. So, why not? Perhaps we could do with some flexibility, especially when public dialogue takes off late in a consultation period, or where consultees reasonably need

Mr Justice Calvert-Smith may not exactly be a household name, but this old Etonian, ex-Director of Public Prosecutions, may well be cheered to the rafters for a couple of judgments delivered in the High Court last week. Those doing the cheering will be charities and community organisations delighted to see that a decision to slash

Whether or not one believed them, the 2010 Election may be remembered as the one where every Party in some way or another promised to defend the ‘front-line’ from the cuts everyone knows are coming. Nurses, doctors, policemen, traffic wardens, teachers, social workers, town planners and all the rest qualify as being on the ‘front-line’