Westminster is in a full flurry of activity, trying to cram in as much as possible until they go back into recess for conference season at the end of next week. That being said, there’s not been much happening in the Commons. Oh, except a minor reshuffle. Which we cover here. So what else has been going on?

Westminster

To the House of Lords this week in Westminster where we had two points of interest arising. Firstly, Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist, one of the Baronesses-in-Waiting (read Government Whip) announced that the Government intends to consult later this year on legislative reforms to make it quicker and easier to make traffic regulation orders. Given the near constant furore at the moment about LTNs and pedestrian and cycling schemes, it will be very interesting to see what form this takes. At present they are hardly a very involved process, and it seems to us that the simplest way to make the process quicker would be to remove the already pretty minimal consultation requirements.  If the Government were to propose this, the backlash could be immense considering the response during the pandemic to local changes. We’ll keep an eye on it and see exactly what they plan to do. Maybe our speculation that we might be coming to the end of the era of LTN controversy might have been a little premature…

We also saw allegations of improper consultation raised in the debate on the Environment Bill. Discussing the issue of pesticide regulation and usage, and particularly talking about their impact on bees and other pollinators Baroness Jones of Whitchurch suggested that a combination of the facts that the public consultations on pesticides are buried on the Health Safety Executive’s website, have consultation documents that come in at over 2,500 pages long and contain 360 questions might imply that the Government aren’t as cognizant and supportive of caution over pesticide use as they claim. To investigate this, I put on my best deer-stalker, grabbed my pipe and took on my alter-ego as Stephen Holmes and headed straight to the scene of the (alleged) crime.

We believe the consultation she is referring to is this one: PPP 001- Cinmethylin DAR which matches the page number cited. The consultation is now closed, so unfortunately we can’t verify if there were indeed 360 questions. There are perhaps a couple of linked points here. The first is about accessibility. We’ve written a couple of times about the need to remove barriers to access, even soft ones, and on the face of it a 2,500 page consultation with 360 questions would certainly seem to constitute a soft barrier to response. What ordinary member of the public is going to read that, and answer even a third of those questions? The answer is probably none, no matter how devoted an eco-warrior they are. On this score, the instinct may well be to mark this down as a sin. But there is a big ‘but’.

It should be remembered that consultations like this one are not really geared towards the general public. Most of the 2,500 pages are composed of intricate scientific data, the sort of thing that, to borrow scientific language for a second, would be cause for immediate optical haemorrhaging in the average member of the public*. Context is always important in consultation, and with the target audience being a scientific one, not a general public one, the length and complexity of this consultation may well be justified. That is not to say we should give the Government a free pass- it is clear that policy around pesticides is one that should be consulted on with the general public and it is- notably the consultation earlier this year on the UK National Action Plan for the Sustainable Use of Pesticides. But they are very different beasts, and often with scientific matter such as this, there are grounds for two ‘levels’ of consultation (though we should be cautious with that term), the public, and the technical. It is difficult to claim really that this is wrong- the public could not be expected to have the knowledge necessary to comment on deeply complex matters. Naturally, if they want to have a go, they shouldn’t be excluded- though less weight may be reasonably placed on their statements. But they shouldn’t be expected to.

*make their eyes bleed

Wales

The Welsh Senedd was back in action this week- not too much to start with there, but some interesting debate on the characterisations used in consultations. The subject matter was the A470 between Upper Boat and Pontypridd and parts of the M4, where the Welsh Government recently consulted on how best to tackle air pollution. The proposals under consideration attracted some controversy over one proposal in particular which debated the introduction of a charge for older, more polluting vehicles. The Welsh Government denied that there were any plans to introduce charges, instead characterising them as development of potential options for the future. If there’s a salutary lesson to be learned here, it is about misapprehensions in public consultation. Investigating potential options via consultations may well be a good idea, but it’s easy for people to misinterpret if it isn’t clear that they aren’t intended to be immediately applicable.

Northern Ireland

The NI Assembly was also back at work, with an interesting debate on a proposed new Defamation Bill. In the debate, reference was made to the individual who conducted the NI Law Commission’s consultation on defamation, who was described as “not just a neutral compiler of responses to the consultation, nor was he merely an academic performing some sort of statistical analysis of responses, such as ‘x% thought this, and y% thought that’. No he was a player. He was a man with opinions about how we should reform our defamation laws”. An interesting mixing of roles you may well think- usually we advise that those conducting the consultation should be as neutral as possible, and should certainly not be opining on the subject matter. We’ll have a bit more of a look at the consultation- it may be that in this circumstance in a specific and expert field such a thing is justified. We certainly wouldn’t advocate it as a general approach however…