One of the things we’ve all missed over the course of the pandemic is that joyous feeling of popping along to a restaurant with our friends, families and loved ones (or even all three) and enjoying a long, languorous meal and perhaps a glass of something. Curiously, the Government has recently taken an interest in this process, not in the meal itself, but in its aftermath. Being socially responsible types, we all no doubt leave a tip for our server, after the conventional debate about how much to leave.

It’s this bit that the Government has recently taken an interest in, finally responding to the month-long consultation they launched in May 2016 on ensuring that tips remained voluntary, actually went to workers, and their status was clear. Unusually, we’re not going to talk at length about the remarkable length of time between the consultation closing and the Government response (we did that last week), but rather have a brief look at the respondents to the consultation.

The Government response informs us that the consultation received 173 responses. Most of them (126/73%) were from “customers of businesses where tipping takes place”, some (17/10%) were “employers or businesses where tips or gratuities were made), a small number (6/3%) were from staff who had received tips and there were a number of “other” respondents (24/14%). It’s the second to last figure that most interested us.

Firstly, it is curious (albeit perhaps unsurprising given general public apathy) that only 6 ‘tip-ees’ responded to the consultation- in light of the potential impacts on their take-home pay we might have expected to see many more. It seems likely that this is more of a comms problem- how well was the consultation promoted to those who might have wanted to see it? From the number of respondents, we might conclude not particularly well.

6 respondents is not much, particularly compared with the number of employers who responded, and given that one of the major issues with tipping in recent years has been the disparities of the staff-employer relationship, and how tips are handled between the two. The second question addressed this latter issue, with a 70% majority of respondents preferring the imposition of a system where employers could not take any deductions from tips. This figure however falls to 24% support from employers. Given the small numbers, it’s not clear how much support for this proposal there was from employees, but we might reasonably guess.

The Government seems to have listened to the (clearly sympathetic) majority view here and have promised to bring forward new measures as part of the Employment Bill to ensure that employers cannot make any deductions not required by law from tips to staff. The consultation does raise an interesting point however about the balance of evidence. Imbalanced consultations are not uncommon, we quite often see consultations where one ‘side’ of the debate often have a significant majority in terms of responses.

Now, most will be familiar with our old adage that consultation is not a numbers game, but rather an evidence seeking exercise, and this certainly still holds true. But it does make us wonder if there might be situations where the disparity in numbers of stakeholders is so significant and stark that it calls the whole exercise into question. If a consultation has 20,000 responses from Side A, but only 2 from Side B, is that still a fair and good consultation? It sounds unlikely, and we suspect that if such a scenario ever arose, it is probably a good indication that the consultation bears deeper examination. Those sorts of numbers might be suggestive of deeper problems.

In this case, given how long ago the consultation was held, it’s difficult to comment with any accuracy about how it was publicised. Given how many responses were from ‘tippers’ compared to those with a direct stake as employer or employee, it seems likely that this one merely fell prey to the whims of fate, and was not the result of, say, a concerted effort for one half of the equation or the other. It’s certainly something for consultors to keep an eye on though, and if you do start noticing significant disparities, it might be worth reviewing your stakeholder mapping practices to ensure you are capturing and reaching all relevant stakeholders.

On 13^th October the Institute will be hosting a “Wednesday Workshop” , following up from this Wednesday’s “Wednesday Wisdom” session. The workshop will focus on practical stakeholder analysis. For more information, please contact the Institute for further details at this link.