Keeping the record

Public consultation is not ‘here today; gone tomorrow’.

We need better archives.

Public consultations come and go. Central Government departments issue 400-500 per annum, and the devolved administrations over 100 each. Some years ago, we calculated that most local authorities have over 100 each; the NHS alone publishes large numbers every month. They vary from technical tidying-up to highly significant policy choices at national or local levels, and anything in between.

They generate massive volumes of documents now supplemented from the huge variety of multi-media materials. The data they attract from consultees is vast, and the published analyses frequently only appear in indigestible volumes, which are rarely examined in detail.

Either it is a monumental waste of effort, having little impact upon decision-making. Or it is a huge potential reservoir of insight into what different types of people and organisations think when asked some difficult questions. It is truly BIG DATA. On this point, the much-derided Dominic Cummings was probably right. Governments are poor at leveraging what they know, and our inability to retain and analyse what we have learnt, collectively through consultations is a classic example of such a failure.

There are many reasons why good records of previous consultations must be kept.

Consultors need to have previous consultations available.

• There are often consultations on exactly the same subject a few years apart, and it is frequently desirable to examine the consultation narratives and ensure a previous one does contaminate the next one etc
• Previous consultees will expectconsultors to take account of their views – even if the subject matter is not identical, so there is a need to remind oneself who said what.
• Legal challenges have frequently found that legitimate expectations are affected by what happened in previous consultations
• The relative success/failure of various dialogue methods will influence what is most appropriate next time around

Consultees may also need access to previous consultations

• They might wish to see what others had to say about specific proposals
• … or understand the extent to which their views were taken into account
• Before deciding whether to participate in a current consultation, potential responders might wish to assess the consultor’s track record in listening to consultees
• … or compare with similar consultations elsewhere.

Fundamentally, however, this is about transparency. Part of the rationale for consultation is to make the decision-making process more visible. The aim is to provide assurance that relevant arguments are heard and heeded. If consultations can be buried and forgotten once they are over, it precludes learning lessons about the process – and limits the ability to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of the decisions themselves.

It is true that Gov.uk holds an impressive archive of central Government consultations – but provides very little information. To be meaningful, we need to record rather more. Who exactly responded? What did they say? What were the questions? And were consultees provided with the right information? Indeed, how easy is it to find out if any output has been published?

In a fairly random exercise last week, I looked at the consultation websites of about 20 public bodies, including local authorities. I imagined myself a stakeholder concerned about service changes made following 2019 consultations and wanted to see how easy it was to find the relevant information. Some London Boroughs had easy access to a reasonable amount of data. Others were moderately useful. But the majority were frankly unacceptable.

Were these organisations who just kept their historical records to themselves? Or is the data simply unavailable? Some seemed determined to conceal anything relating to previous consultation – as if there might be something to hide.

Sometimes there is. Back in 2012, the Home Office ran a consultation on changes to Building Regulations. Its data was never adequately published and when the Grenfell Inquiry rightly probed into who knew what and when, it suddenly became important. Surprising, therefore, to note that the Government initially refused to exhume the consultee responses, saying that the information request was vexatious – correctly overturned by the Information Commissioner.

Best practice consultors all need to build and publish a permanent archive – available not just to policy researchers and academics, but easy for members of the public to access. Earlier this year, the Institute invested grant money from Innovate UK to build a comprehensive data warehouse that can serve as a repository for all current or previous consultations. This is MIDAS, that becomes available to members this autumn. It is not a replacement for the excellent consultation platforms used by many of our members and clients. MIDAS is a business intelligence tool that, over time, will become the definitive national archive of consultations – with the facility to be customised with additional data for specific sectors or industries. Its availability abruptly ends the excuse that there is no effective way to hold and provide access to a consultation archive.

In summary, public engagement and consultation professionals have paid insufficient attention to the need to keep good records. As a result, the public is denied an important source of information about decision-making in a democracy. And, as a profession, we have failed to monitor what dialogue methods work best, and therefore limited our ability to learn how to do things better. It is time to put this right

TRIGGER POINTS

1. What is your current practice re keeping consultation records?
2. Have you considered your consultation archive policy? How long? How accessible? In what format etc.
3. The story of the scandalous refusal to publish responses to the 2012 Building regulations consultation can be found on https://www.consultationinstitute.org/vexatious-bid-to-see-consultee-responses-on-fire-safety/
4. Watch the MIDAS introductory video here (https://www.consultationinstitute.org/midas/)
5. Or to visit the current public MIDAS data warehouse, visit here (https://www.midasdb.com)
6. To discuss your own Archiving policy and how MIDAS can be used – either for an in-house archive or for public access, please email info@consultationinstitute.org to arrange a more detailed demonstration

This is the 372nd 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.