Why does more Consultation Evidence Weaken Decision-Making

Introduction

In public decision making, it is common to treat volume as protection. More meetings. More survey returns. More submissions. The assumption is that a larger evidence base makes a decision safer under scrutiny.

That assumption is often wrong.

Scrutiny rarely turns on how much engagement you ran. It turns on whether your evidence base is coherent, proportionate, and clearly connected to the decision you take. That is where volume can weaken you.

The flaw in the volume mindset

The Cabinet Office Consultation Principles are explicit: consultation should be clear and purposeful, and you should not consult for the sake of it. Volume driven engagement falls into exactly that trap. Activity becomes a substitute for clarity about what the engagement is meant to inform.

Once that happens, you collect:

• responses that cannot be compared because the questions differ
• feedback shaped by channel and context rather than a consistent frame
• themes that proliferate without an agreed decision test

The risk is not that you lack evidence. The risk is that you cannot credibly explain what your evidence means.

How quantity creates inconsistency

The Gunning principles require that consultation happens at a formative stage, provides sufficient information for intelligent consideration, allows adequate time, and that responses are conscientiously considered.

High volume programmes create a practical tension with those requirements.

The more channels and strands you run, the more likely you are to create:

• different versions of the proposal across materials and events
• different implied choices depending on who was spoken to and when
• conflicting summaries that undermine conscientious consideration

This is not a critique of engagement effort. It is a warning about what happens when evidence generation outpaces your ability to integrate it.

Narrative fragility at the point of decision

Moseley remains a useful reminder of what courts and challengers care about: not participation theatre, but whether people were given a fair opportunity to respond to the real decision, including the existence of choices.

Volume can make that harder, not easier, because it produces a record that is easy to attack for inconsistency.

Narrative fragility shows up when:

• different parts of your report imply different conclusions
• late engagement forces unplanned shifts in framing
• quantitative headlines sit awkwardly alongside unresolved qualitative objections
• there is no stable line from what you heard to what you decided

At that point, decision makers often face the worst combination: a thick evidence pack and a thin decision narrative.

Why more feels safer than better

Volume feels defensible because it is visible. You can count it. You can list it.

But appraisal and evaluation disciplines treat evidence as decision support, not bulk documentation. The Green Book frames appraisal as objective analysis to support decision making, including the scrutiny of options and trade offs.

That is the shift consultation teams often need to make. Evidence must help you choose, not just prove you listened.

Rebalancing towards better evidence

If you want decisions that hold under scrutiny, the design question is not “how do we engage more?” It is “what evidence is decision critical, and what is noise?”

That typically means:

• set decision questions first, then design engagement against them
• keep questions limited to what is necessary, as the Consultation Principles advise¹
• separate decision critical evidence from contextual intelligence
• name disagreement and uncertainty plainly rather than burying it in volume
• show how you weighed evidence, not just how you collected it

This reduces engagement theatre and increases decision clarity.

Conclusion

The popular instinct is to treat volume as legitimacy.

The safer discipline is to treat evidence as an input to judgement.

More engagement evidence is not the same as better evidence.

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