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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

Most people won’t read the Government’s White Paper Open Public Services. And if they did, they might struggle to understand what it says! Maybe it’s because the Coalition has followed the previous administration’s habit of peppering the text of such documents with references to any and every current initiative that could just about be regarded

Experienced organisers of consultations are familiar with many caricatured groups of people. The phrase Usual Suspects is often used to describe those who can be relied upon to appear in all weathers and offer their views with enthusiasm on even the most boring subject. Many a consultor has forgiven them their foibles just because their

There are at least two interpretations to what’s going on in national politics right now. One version sees a Government having to trim its ambitions and reach all sorts of accommodations in order to keep a fragile Coalition together. Compromises and re-thinks are characterised as U-turns in the popular press and Ministerial exits are solemnly