Memorandum by the London Borough of Brent
(LGC 19)
Effectiveness of public consultation and its impact
on local authority decision-making and possible ways to improve
it
Brent Council has a comprehensive range of consultation
structures, some of which are recent and some of which have been
in place since the mid 1990's. Service areas are generally aware
of most consultation opportunities and routinely make good use
of them.
Brent Council set up its dedicated consultation
team in 2000. The team, which consists of one Head of Consultation
and three Consultation Officer posts, is located at the corporate
centre of the Council as part of Brent's Communications and Consultation
Directorate. The team has produced the Councils Corporate Consultation
Strategy, set corporate consultation standards, provides advice
and guidance on best practice to service areas and partner agencies,
provides training and has produced a corporate consultation toolkit.
The team also undertakes ad-hoc research projects on behalf of
different service areas.
The consultation team also manages five area
and seven service user consultative forums; project manages the
work of a Brent Citizens' Panel of 2,000+ local residents and
undertakes ad-hoc research projects.
Brent's five area consultative forums are made
up of "bundles" of electoral wards and loosely based
on "town centre" areas. The area forums cover the entire
geographical area of the borough. Each forum meets four times
per year. A database of approximately 5,000 residents has been
created out of past and current forum attendees. Average attendance
for area forum meetings is 80. Issues raised at area and/or user
forums are reported back to the Council through a quarterly progress
report to Overview Committee.
Brent's seven service user consultative forums
cover the following interest/user groups: Pensioners, Children,
Youth, Disabilities & Mental Health, Voluntary Sector, Private
Sector Housing, and Black & Minority Ethnic residents/groups.
Brent Citizens' Panel consists of just over
2,100 local residents reflecting Brent's diverse communities.
The panel is managed on behalf of Brent Council by the market
research organisation MORI. Brent's Consultation Team project-manage
the work going into the panel. The Panel was first established
in July 2000, in partnership between the Council, the local police,
and the Brent Health Action Zone. The original panel consisted
of 1,100 local residents who were recruited through two recruitment
surveys carried our in 1999 and 2000. An additional 1,000 panel
members were recruited during 2002 through the Brent Residents'
Attitudes Survey.
The main aim of the panel is to provide a platform
through which Brent Council and its partners can listen and accurately
gauge resident's views. Panel survey results assist service providers
to improve and refine their services to meet local residents'
needs.
The panel is an effective research tool capable
of giving generating robust statistical data. To date the panel
has been used on 17 occasions for quantitative and qualitative
research projects. These range from complete panel postal surveys,
telephone surveys by Brent Health Action Zone and Brent Police
and a source for recruiting focus and discussion groups. This
research has proved very important in informing best value reviews
and the development of service planning and policy making.
Currently Brent is seeking to renew its Panel,
probably for a further three years. Although it's generally agreed
that a new panel be build on the successes of the previous one,
we are looking at a more sustainable model with less emphasis
on hard research and more emphasis on community involvement and
engagement.
A culture of consultation is well established
in Brent and extensive use is made by service areas and partners
of all the consultation opportunities. Notwithstanding, we now
that some methodologies have inherent weaknesses and we constantly
seek to review effectiveness of consultation within the Borough.
For example Panels suffer from "attrition", low response
rates and "conditioning" with the result that their
value as research tools can begin to diminish quite quickly. In
addition, forum audiences are largely self-selecting and do not
necessarily provide particularly representative consultation.
They are however very good for disseminating information and at
engaging and involving a particularly active section of the community.
Current ways to improve consultation in Brent
include:
— A new Consultation Strategy 2005-08.
— An intranet based consultation toolkit—2005
onwards.
— Re-branding Area and User Forums
to attract a more diverse audience.
— Recruiting a new Citizens' Panel.
— A review of the effectiveness of
User Consultative Forums and other user groups.
— The creation of an interactive Consultation
Database—"Consultation Tracker".
— The development of an on-line consultation
survey tool using SNAP software.
How public consultation fits into the local authority
decision-making process
Consultation is an important part of Brent's
decision-making process at a number of different levels.
The Council commissions a major triennial survey,
"Living in Brent" through its Citizens' Panel. This
is a face-to-face survey with a structured sample of 1,000 local
residents. We also use the triennial Best Value Performance Indicator
General Survey. Both these surveys provide hard data on the overall
satisfaction levels with the Council, corporate health indicators
and a range of service specific satisfaction measures. The Residents'
Attitude Survey also provides information on general "liveability"
health and policing issues. All of this data is cascaded through
directorate and service area management teams. It's very important
in developing strategy in terms of preparing for the Council's
CPA assessment as well as being used to inform service area improvements.
In addition there are a number of large and
repeated research projects. The "One in Five" household
survey—undertaken as part of major regeneration initiative.
Other repeat surveys include:
— BVPI Surveys on Planning / Revenues
& Benefits and Tenant Satisfaction.
— Crime and Disorder Audit.
— Survey on the effectiveness of the
Town Centre Warden Schemes.
Brent Council is also looking closely at developing
a more strategic and sustainable approach to consulting with children
and young people as part of the process of implementing the Children
Act.
The Council is also running a pilot "ward
working" scheme in six of its electoral wards. It's intended
that the scheme will be eventually rolled out across all wards.
Ward working offers local residents the opportunity to become
involved in local ward issues and have some impact on mainstream
council service spending in their particular ward. Significant
amounts of consultation are envisaged as this project rolls out.
Up to 30,000 residents have already been consulted in the six
pilot wards.
Most service areas routinely commission service
satisfaction research projects. This could include anything from
surveys, focus groups and mystery shopping exercises, or a mixture
of one or more.
Public consultation—part of a continuing
process of communication, information dissemination and participation
The Council recognises the important link between
communications and consultation and to some extent they can be
viewed as two sides of the same coin. The Council's magazine,
the Brent Magazine, is distributed to 100,000+ households
in the Borough every month. The magazine is used extensively for
awareness raising, information dissemination as well as actual
consultation. The Consultation Team is located within the Communications
and Consultation Directorate. That position allows us to look
at and work jointly on the communications side of many consultation
initiatives. Some recent examples include:
— A new Licensing Strategy.
— The Local Development Framework.
— Council Tax communication and consultation.
— Communication and consultation on
the Council's Vision for a redeveloped Wembley.
We also recognise the relationship between information
and satisfaction levels. Research shows that residents who feel
informed about services are generally likely to be more satisfied.
Development of best practice and extent of application
Since 2001 a Brent wide officer Consultation
Co-ordination Group, (CCG), has been set up to help to co-ordinate
research and consultation across the authority and its key partners.
The meetings are attended by representatives from across services
areas, as well as from Brent Police and the local Primary Care
Trust. The key objectives of the group are to share best practice
and discuss the latest consultation initiatives ie Best Value
surveys, Citizens Panel surveys and the development of a Brent
on line consultation register, "Consultation Tracker".
The most recent CCG meeting included presentations by MORI on
developing partnership approaches to consultation and SNAP Surveys
on new developments in survey software.
During autumn 2004 "Brent Consultation
Tracker" was launched on the Council's Internet site. Brent
Consultation Tracker is an interactive consultation database,
which enables local residents to find out what consultations are
carried out by Brent Council and some of its partner organisations.
"Consultation Tracker" covers a range of activities,
such as customer surveys, focus or discussion groups, statutory
consultations and other opinion-related research.
We expect "Consultation Tracker" will
become an important tool, enabling the Council and its partners
to coordinate and plan consultation more effectively, and to avoid
duplication of consultation activity. "Consultation Tracker"
will become an integral part of Brent's Consultation Strategy
2005-08, which to aims to improve how the Council and its partners
consult and involve local communities and stakeholders in Brent.
Consultation Team members also attend the London
Wide Consultation Network. This group, which consists of policy
and consultation officers across London Authorities, meets quarterly
and shares best and good consultation practice.
We are also developing an on-line consultation
survey tool, in partnership with the West London Alliance group
of local authorities.
To what extent consultation consultation excercises
reach an audience beyond those who typically participate
Since the last census, it's now confirmed that
visible minority ethnic groups make up the majority of the borough
population. Although this throws into sharper focus the need to
extend consultation, increasing diversity and consulting with
so called "hard to reach" groups has always been a continuing
challenge for the authority. In Brent it's probably true to say
that we regard the concept of "hard to reach" as in
some senses equaling "more expensive to reach".
Standing consultation structures are more inclined
to show some failure to attract a more diverse audience. A recent
survey of area forum attendees shows that their audiences remain
predominantly white, middle aged and middle class. Although there
has been an improvement in recent years we are continuing to look
at ways in which to make audiences more diverse. We are currently
involved in a forum re-branding exercise, which includes more
targeted and relevant advertising.
We also recognise that attrition is a factor
affecting the representativeness of our Citizens' Panel. The attrition
factor is most marked amongst panel members from black and minority
ethnic backgrounds and young people. We are about to renew the
Brent Citizens' Panel and are currently looking at a more sustainable
recruitment methodology.
Brent has a good record of targeting consultation
at particular groups. These have included: elders, children, youth,
Women, small businesses, residents with disabilities and residents
from black and ethnic minority backgrounds.
The Consultation Team ran a series of BME consultation
workshops in 2002. The workshops looked at issues such as the
extent to which residents from those groups could be reluctant
to engage in mainstream consultation activity. A new service user
consultative forum, the BME Service User Consultative Forum has
been set up. This forum, which has a steering group of local residents
and a database of 600+ local BME organizations has proved to be
the most successful of the user forums to date.
We don't see however the creation of a BME forum
as a total solution to meeting the consultation needs of the BME
community. The BME forum itself sees the continuing encouragement
into mainstream consultation as an important role within the various
communities that go to make up its membership.
Impact of new cabinet structures in local govt
and the extent to which they facilitate consultation and the involvement
of constituents in decision making
A cabinet style administration was formally
adopted in Brent in May 2002. From that date, the principal standing
consultative fora, (five area and seven service user), have been
incorporated into the constitution. Although the constitution
makes it clear that consultative forums do not form part of the
Council's formal decision making process, it does allow for representations
to be made, both formally an informally to council committees
and/or the executive.
In practical terms incorporation means that
the forums have their terms of reference located in the constitution.
Other benefits include, having an "elected member" chair
and having their proceedings formally minuted by officers from
the Council's legal and democratic services directorate.
Having an elected "member" as forum
chair automatically means that there is a link, (albeit informal),
opened up between the forum and the Council as a decision making
body. However, formal linking of the forums to the Council and
tracking recommendations and representations had always been a
specific provision in the constitution from the outset. This was
initially achieved through the requirement to provide full copies
of minutes of all forums, to all members of the Scrutiny and Overview
committees on a quarterly basis.
Following a recent review by an Overview convened
task group, this process has been improved and the Consultation
Team in consultation with forum chairs prepare a quarterly progress
report to the Overview committee. This report highlights current
issues and trends in forum business for the preceding quarter.
The quarterly progress report is also routinely
circulated to chairs of all Scrutiny sub-committees.
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