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.