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There are lots of issues emerging right now about the way Government departments and their agencies consult the public … and many of them are on important matters of policy. But it is at local level that public engagement really makes a difference, and it is for this reason that the newly-published National Census of […]

No-one can now deny that the MPs expenses issue has done immense damage to the reputation of Parliament. True, it’s a diversion from serious policy issues, and that there’s a lot of hypocrisy flying about with a holier-than-thou media salivating at yet another poke at elected politicians. But the damage is real. And there’s a

One of the myths about consultation is that it is a defined one-off event that starts and finishes … and that’s it. Now some consultation exercises do have those characteristics, but these are comparatively rare. Questions requiring considered input from the general public or technical stakeholders seldom emerge from thin air; there is usually a

Two apparently unconnected news stories in the past few days illustrate how the world is changing around us. By now, the number of people who will have watched the Susan Boyle video will have run into tens of millions. In one period of 24 hours last week, the number rose from 1 million to 5

One of the terms that’s used for up-to-the-minute information technology is Cloud computing. There have been worse examples of marketing hype; at least this conjures up an appropriate image of bits and bytes winging their way from place to place at the speed of light in the wireless world we now inhabit. It seems that

One of the most persistent urban myths about consultation is that it’s a numbers game. Reducing complex issues to a yes/no vote is always a risky business, and it is one of the reasons why quantitative surveys are gradually losing ground to more qualitative and more participative methods. For, in consultation, consultees are not always

The Local Government Association (LGA) has published a list of 200 terms “that public bodies should not use if they want to communicate with local people.” High time, you might say! Without doubt we all rely too much on jargon, and just as certainly a lot of it obscures rather than illuminates. Of the 200

There have always been debates about opting in or out of things. Forty years ago, it was about trades union membership; two decades later it was about stakeholder pensions; nowadays it is about organ donation. In all cases, it is an argument about whether society presumes a certain course of action, whilst letting individuals do