What happens when consultees want a much wider debate than the consultation scope allows? Can you question the effectiveness of Regulation? People in Lancashire are upset. Many of them have campaigned vigorously against drilling for shale gas. Following the County Council’s refusal to grant planning permission, Cuadrilla, the applicant, appealed. After a Planning Inquiry, the […]
Consultation and the fear of ‘fracking’ Read More »
It is time for our national politicians to take a closer interest in public consultations. Politicians are quite ambivalent about consultation. When in Opposition, they complain bitterly that there is not enough. When in Government they find it irksome and time-consuming when they are certain what they want to do, but are rather glad to
Why Parliament must take notice Read More »
Janice Turner is a respected columnist for ‘The Times’ and last week she turned her fire on Keith Vaz MP. Her criticism was not his personal behaviour per se but what she regards as the hypocrisy of the Home Affairs Select Committee he chaired. The issue is an emotive one, the case for the decriminalisation
The recent Tobacco industry Judicial Review helps us to handle battles between the ‘experts’. Many public consultations revolve around matters of strong professional disagreements, and one of the biggest challenges facing Governments, Regulators and public bodies of all kinds is how to take decisions without being unfair to one side or another. Nowhere is this
New insights for the interpretation of conflicting consultation responses Read More »
Just when Institute members and others left for annual leave in late July, comes a High Court judgment to worry those who have to brief Councillors, Members of public bodies, NHS decision-makers and indeed anyone who has to determine difficult issues following a public consultation. The case is R (ex parte DAT & BNM) v
Due process is not a term we use much in the UK. We certainly observe it but we do not use the expression as frequently as our friends in the United States, where it is found in two key Amendments to the US Constitution. There it is mainly about judicial processes and the need to
The hurly-burly of politics is often, in reality, a somewhat remote process. Journalists eager to break tomorrow’s story rather than probe and assess yesterday’s can whip up a synthetic excitement in what they admit is the ‘Westminster Village’. And the rest of us just get on with our lives. Just occasionally, however, democracies throw up astonishingly fast-moving dramas. They are
Counting to Ten – Is consultation at its most valuable when providing a breathing space Read More »
We have always regarded a referendum as a form of a consultation – and last week’s excitement illustrated many of the pitfalls familiar to public engagement practitioners. The in/out question has many critics – unsurprisingly mostly from the losing side. But experts have known for years that asking people a binary question is crude, and that is why they are often described
Commentators had predicted for a while that the Government was intent on further reducing – if not eliminating – the role of local authorities in running schools. So it was no great surprise when the Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan announced their wholesale conversion into academies. What was unexpected, though, was dropping the requirement for Parent
A few years ago, IPSOS-MORI started publishing comparisons between various statistics of social or political significance and people’s perceptions of the same numbers; they repeated the exercise in many countries. In Britain, as in other countries, there are substantial differences, and the research – called The Perils of Perception is frequently cited by those who
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