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What makes a consultation exercise effective? According to Jitinder Kohli, Chief Executive of the Better Regulation Commission, speaking at a seminar late last month, if you were to stop a civil servant in the street and ask them to recite the principles of good consultation, the one (and possibly the only) thing they would be able to tell you is that a consultation exercise should last twelve weeks.

Well it’s a start. And when it comes to the many and various consultations the government runs, it is the only aspect of consultation is routinely monitored and reported on. Whilst there is no doubt that a decent length of time is required to run an effective consultation, it is certainly possible (and we have all seen it done) to run a very poor consultation exercise which ticks the twelve week box but does little else.

Consulting on consultation: who to consult?

As part of its review of consultation policy, the government issued a consultation on consultation, “Effective Consultation” (PDF, 383kb) in June 07 allowing a commendable fifteen weeks for responses. As Colin Adamson pointed out in his June blog, all the organisations the consultation document was sent to were the “big players in the national consultation game”.

Attending a seminar run last week by the Better Regulation Executive, I was interested to see that despite the fact that there were several bona fide members of the public present, the focus was once again very firmly on what we refer to in our response as “the professional” consultees. The first speaker represented the trade unions; the second, the employers. They were the sort of people for whom responding to consultations forms the bread and butter of their day jobs and the majority of the audience seemed to be out of pretty much the same stable, at one point vying with each other as to the number of responses they had to submit within the next fortnight. Being responsible leaders they did, of course, consult with their members but these members in turn were professionals, paid to respond to consultations from government and others.

Talking to the People: how hard can it be?

All well and good. After all, who better to tell you how they feel about widgets than the people who run the widget factories and the widget makers’ union? But a great many recent government consultations have been about subjects much wider than the humble widget. The government says it wants to know what The People think about health, schools, social services, the very way our country is run. They like the principle. They like the rhetoric even better. But do they know how to do it?

Only the final speaker, from the Children’s Rights Alliance, seemed to have any real experience of trying to elicit the views of the “amateur consultees”, those ordinary members of the public: users, volunteers, patients, carers, parents, young people, old people – the people whose views everybody claims to want but no-one really seems to value enough to be bothered to work out how on earth to gather them.

The balance of the speakers, combined with the Better Regulation Executive’s apparently well-developed (cosy?) relationships with its “key stakeholders” meant that very little of the discussion at the seminar addressed the sorts of issues which we at MAC, with an emphasis on the user experience, see as being at the heart of effective consultation – issues such as capacity building in voluntary and community organisations, developing consultation as part of a two-way dialogue rather than a one-off event, focussing on issues which are relevant to the people you are talking to and finding new and different ways of engaging with them which meet their needs rather than those of the consulting organisation.

Fear of the Empty Room

Chairing the session, Jitinder Kohli expressed a great keenness to find out what more could be done to help the government find out these views of “real people”, the amateurs. Many shoulders were shrugged and heads shaken and he showed how far he and his colleagues were from understanding any of the basic principles of effective public engagement by referring to his terror of the oft-cited bureaucrat’s recurring nightmare, the Big Public Meeting Where No-one Turns Up.

Interestingly on this point he also mentioned his accompanying fear that when he got back from the Meeting in the Big Empty Room (if he ever dared go there) he would be accused of wasting public money. It’s a fair point. Yet value for money is scarcely mentioned in the consultation paper and in our response we have raised once again our concern that a true measure of effectiveness must include some analysis of the costs incurred. Too often we see organisations proudly boast of the number of meetings held being unable to tell you how many people attended or whether the contributions were useful and constructive to those consulting or what those attending thought of the event.

Regulation and consultation – how are they related?

Curiously, responsibility for pursuing this consultation exercise and running the related seminars seems to have shifted since June from the Cabinet Office to the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. This is a worrying sign as it seems like a sure-fire way of making sure that consultation gets tarred by many with the same brush as regulation: something without much obvious value which gets in the way of doing the “real job”. Let’s hope the slashing of red tape does not accidentally damage the prospect of better public consultation before it has even got off the ground.

Taking away the fear

Have a look at our response and let us know what you think needs to be done to take away the fear and give public servants the confidence to go out there and talk to people and to make consultation truly effective.

M-A-C supports organisations and individuals organising consultations and any exercise where user views are being sought and collected. We can write the document, set up websites and user surveys and facilitate small groups. We have access to printers and designers and help design and implement communication plans. We can advise and assist in the implementation of 'influencing' programmes for opinion leaders and other stakeholders. Visit http://www.mooreadamsoncraig.co.uk for more information.