Originally published 3 April 2006. This article is retained from the tCI archive. Law, policy or practice may have changed since publication.
Consultation is used to fulfil many objectives…….probably far too many; it’s one of the problems that leads to unwarranted expectations.
One role, however, that is seldom exploited sufficiently, but may be poised for greater significance, is that of acting as a check upon the executive.
Here’s how. In the last ten years we’ve seen a period of intense target-setting by Central Government, convinced that the best way to secure performance improvements in public bodies was to focus them on some very specific numbers. Gradually, this regime was relaxed and better Councils, for example, were excused some of the more stringent requirements. We are now at the point where the Audit Commission, which inspected Best Value and presided over the CPA, is itself being downsized and a recent ODPM Consultation invited views on how best to focus the newly-merged Inspectorates having the task of ensuring public sector performance. The flavour of the month is to provide incentives for better achievements rather than swamp an organisation with critical auditors.
But there may be an even better way. Reaching a particular statistical target is one thing; satisfying service users or customers is another. Ultimately what matters is whether citizens believe they are receiving the services they want or expect, and the way to test this is to ask them. Best Value consultation has been doing this for years, but without the impact that it should have made.
Consultation is one of the Four Cs of Best Value; the others are Challenge, Competition and Comparison. Too often consultation has been done in a perfunctory way – just a simple survey of a questionable sample of customers - but who looks at the resulting Report?
The Institute believes that the output of ALL Local Authority consultations should be reported to their Scrutiny Committees so that the voice of stakeholders can be heard loud and long. Ditto for other public bodies; whatever the scrutiny arrangements, that is where consultation output should become visible. Of course, Managers who commission consultation exercises will be the primary users of this data. No-one wants to delay or frustrate the link between listening to interested parties and the decision-making process, but the publication of consultations remains too much of a hit-and-miss affair and the involvement of the Scrutiny Committee would strengthen transparency as well as providing a reality-check against the performance of executives.
This is the gist of the submission made by the Institute to the ODPM. It does not see consultation as replacing an Inspection regime, but it does assert that the voice of the public, as expressed in consultation exercises, may have a greater role to play in ensuring high performance than we’ve previously acknowledged. Trigger points
- Obtain and study the Institute’s Submission
- Examine your current Scrutiny arrangements – do they get to see all consultation outputs?
- Look for innovative ways to make consultation output even more visible; is your website providing this level of detail?
This is the 56th Tuesday Topic; a full list of subjects covered is available for Institute members and is a valuable resource covering so many aspects of consultation and engagement