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People can always criticise a public consultation! Just on the timescales alone, it is quite a challenge to please everyone. Leaving aside the more obvious blunders such as announcing it quietly when nobody notices (a recent CLG consultation of interest to local government was published on December 27th!) or holding a six week consultation in […]

Those who wish to influence detailed aspects of these new policies have till 20th March to comment. But, although they apply only to England, the underlying principles raise interesting questions which extend to all public bodies, or even to private firms or third sector organisations – in fact any that operate in the public domain.

Stockbrokers used to say Sell in May and go away. Ministers just publish White Papers, Consultations or Guidelines, leaving those who need to understand and implement them with some weighty holiday reading. In the case of the Empowerment White Paper – Communities in Control – we are meant to believe that the “journey” towards greater

Sometimes public policy seems to catch the mood of the moment; often it misses by a mile! What’s about to happen in health and social care in England could emerge as a seminal moment in the annals of public involvement, with implications for virtually every other public service. On the other hand, if Governments continue

2008 is the year when joined-up consultations will finally take off. It would be great if this extended to the whole public sector, but for the moment let’s accept that to do so at local level will be a huge step forward. It is here that consultation fatigue is most evident. Local representative organisations, voluntary

Any analysis of the 99 Topics published by the Institute over the last four years would reveal problems and opportunities in roughly equal measure. The problems are well known, though solutions are more elusive. Too many consultations are ill-thought-through; under-resourced, use the wrong methods, fail to feed back and struggle to have the intended beneficial

A public dialogue is as good as the information upon which it is conducted. So much is self-evident, but observing this mantra is a bit more difficult in the context of controversial consultations. Take last week’s launch of the Heathrow expansion consultation. It is full of technical information, interpretations and analyses thereof. Battle lines have

It might be easy to dismiss much of the Government’s flashy new “empowerment” agenda1 as yet more spin. But, despite being open to criticism, there are some really significant positives in what is now proposed. First, a criticism – we have yet another piece of terminology. We could not find “Empowerment” anywhere in the new

Direct democracy has many enthusiastic fans. They point out that some questions are just too important for elected representatives to decide; constitutional changes are often cited as classic issues of this kind, and the current call for a Referendum on the latest European treaty just reflects some people’s views that it contains proposals whose significance