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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 316-ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning,
Local Government and the Regions

 

 

LOCAL GOVERNMENT CONSULTATION

 

 

Tuesday 8 March 2005

PHIL HOPE MP and MR ASHLEY POTTIER

Evidence heard in Public Questions 253 - 326

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee

on Wednesday 9 March 2005

Members present

Andrew Bennett, in the Chair

Sir Paul Beresford

Mr Clive Betts

Mr David Clelland

Mr John Cummings

Chris Mole

 

________________

 

Witnesses: Phil Hope, a Member of the House, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, and Mr Ashley Pottier, Team Leader, Democracy and Local Government Unit, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, examined.

Q253 Chairman: Could I welcome you to the Committee. Would you like to identify yourself and your team.

Phil Hope: Chairman, my name is Phil Hope. I am the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. I regret we do not have Paul Rowsell here. He is stuck at an airport in Strasbourg - I am not absolutely certain why, but the plane he was due to catch did not take off - and I have to give his apologies. I have beside me Ashley Pottier, who is a team leader from the Democracy and Local Government Unit within the ODPM.

Q254 Chairman: Would you like to say anything by way of introduction?

Phil Hope: If I may, Chairman. I welcome this opportunity to give evidence to the Committee on the subject of consultation in local government. There is a great deal happening on this whole agenda and since 1977 there has been quite a big uptake in initiatives across local government in terms how local government consults local communities. One of the big directions of travel has been a lot more use of innovative, more deliberative forms of consultation by local authorities, building on the good examples of practice going on in some authorities. Certainly we see local authorities much more now recognising the benefits of consultation in terms of service delivery and community engagement to the local communities. They are reaching a wider range of individuals as well in the processes they are using. I think it is fair to say that the quality does vary significantly between different authorities, so there is a real task for us all to raise the quality of consultation to the level of the best performers. Certainly in our five-year plan on sustainable communities we make it very clear that community engagement is a core part of how you develop what is a stable community in the way that the local government goes about doing its business. Consultation is one element of a whole process of engagement, from information providing at one end through to being actively involved in decision-making, through to delivering services. Consultation is one part of that whole spectrum. We published our Local Vision document, which talks about the future of local government in ten years time, and two of the "daughter documents", the Neighbourhood document and the Leadership document, both put a lot of emphasis on the importance of consultation. I want to say at the outset that I think it is important we do not confuse consultation with accountability. I am very clear in my mind that we elect politicians, ourselves as MPs and local councillors, to represent and to make decisions in their communities on behalf of the people who have elected them. Consultation is an important part of the process but it is not the way politicians are accountable: they are accountable through the ballot box ultimately for the decisions they take. It is a critical part of the decision-making process but lots of other things happen when MPs or local councillors make their decisions. I do not want to confuse consultation with scrutiny. Scrutiny is a system we have set up, and strong executive and strong scrutiny together really do improve the performance of local authorities. Consultation is part of scrutiny. Whether in the local ward or on a theme for the whole council, consultation is important but it is not scrutiny itself. It is a part of the process. Members may want to clarify that in more detail, but I wanted the distinction that I see between these two to be clear from the start. Consultation I think has improved enormously, but, as I say, it is variable and our task is to try to raise the quality of that process to the level of the best.

Q255 Chris Mole: You said consultation is important, how important is it for local authorities to consult communities on strategic issues and day-to-day decisions about local services?

Phil Hope: We regard it as very important because we think that good consultation results in better decisions, achieves better service delivery. It may be that the council may not agree with a proportion of the people with whom it has consulted on the result of a consultation. In fact it is almost inevitable that when you consult you will get different views, but, hearing all those views and importantly feeding back what you have heard about what people have said and showing the decision that you have made and how it relates to the consultation you have had, gives confidence to people that you have heard their views, but, importantly, it will influence the decision you make because you will hear what people say. That is true at a strategic level, which I think is very important - and there are various parts of the law which say you have to consult: planning law and housing law and so on - but also at the level of councils having a good relationship with their community. We are convinced that good consultation achieves better service delivery.

Q256 Chris Mole: Looking at the Department's five-year plan: Sustainable Communities: People, Places and Prosperity, how critical is high quality and effective consultation in ensuring that gets delivered?

Phil Hope: I think a sustainable community is one where there has been good quality consultation. Because people are then aware of the issues and have had their views known, and the council is then making informed decisions about the combination of economic, social, environmental issues that they need to juggle - as authorities do when they are developing a sustainable community. Hearing all those different views and ensuring that the community as a whole is consulted, and not particular pressure groups - who have a role to play but should not, as it were, hi-jack the agenda - the Sustainable Communities plan that we have published does suggest, embedded within it, there should be good, thorough processes, of consultation.

Q257 Sir Paul Beresford: In the light of what you have just said in both answers, how do you feel about the mayor for London, who consulted on the congestion charge, got a resounding "No" and just went ahead?

Phil Hope: It is quite interesting because, as I said, there is a real difference between consultation and decision-making. The mayor or anybody else might make decisions, but if they have consulted, if they have heard the views, if they then feed back their views and explain when they are making their decision how that consultation has affected that decision one way or the other, then people can know they have been consulted and have had a chance to influence. If the decision does not go their way - and that may happen on any number of issues that a local council may take - I do not think that undermines the importance of consultation. It just makes clear the distinction that I made at the start, that, ultimately, whether the people do or do not like Ken's decision on the Congestion Charge will be a matter for the ballot box when they come to re-elect a mayor of London. That he should consult in developing that policy I think is very important.

Q258 Sir Paul Beresford: You do not feel many of the people of London will feel he has Alconian eyesight and that he is turning a blind eye to anything.

Phil Hope: I do not think it is for me to make a judgments about the performance of the mayor of London but I can say that I do think it is very important that there is an effective process of consultation and people in London have had a chance of have their say. They can hear the various balances, of how the options have been weighed up, and then see the decision that has been made.

Q259 Sir Paul Beresford: What happens next time there is a consultation? Everyone will say it is a waste of time and just sit on their hands.

Phil Hope: That would be a very cynical view of the importance of consultation. I do think local authorities, the mayor, other bodies when they consult, do so seriously - they do take into account what people have said, they do try to balance different pressures on them and different factors. The views of the people they consult is a critical part of those decisions. But, ultimately, if the population who vote for the mayor or any other body think that body has got it wrong, and seriously wrong enough for them to vote against them, then that is for them to do.

Q260 Chairman: Is it not the problem though that the people doing the consultation, particularly the people organising it, want to highlight the fact of "Have your say," almost implying that the decision-making is being passed to people being consulted. Is it not important for them to make it clear that this is, if you like, background information to the decision-makers.

Phil Hope: I think you are right. As I said at the beginning, this idea of a continuum, between, as it were, just publishing an announcement in the press, here is some information which you can read and that is it, through being asked through questionnaires, focus groups, surveys and all the various methods that are there to examine in more detail what people think, what different groups think, making sure you are getting the hard-to-reach groups, involving young people, the black and minority ethnic groups and so on that may otherwise be excluded, doing all those activities and then receiving all that feedback, analysing it, publishing it, telling people what people said and then explaining the decision that you eventually make is a critical part of the process. But consultation, you are absolutely right, Chairman, is not the same as the decision in itself. I think people recognise they cannot all have their own way. That, by definition, is not possible. They want to see that the people making the decision have genuinely taken into account their views.

Q261 Mr Betts: There has been an increase in the amount of consultation and the number of other initiatives that take place. How far does central government feel it is driving this and how much does it take into account what else is going on? In my own constituency, it is in the areas which have the greatest number of problems that the most consultation takes place about how to resolve them, and you almost get some overload. We have an area panel in the Dartington area of my constituency - which is good practice, it is what the local authorities are encouraged to do and it works quite well. We have had a consultation on the area next door - again, good practice. The local authority comes along and requires a planning and consultation framework as well; there is a Pathfinder Consultation because it is a Pathfinder area; there is SRB funding - and a requirement for good practice to consult on that; then the local area forum does its own consultation on community resources and education networks - which is very good and of a high quality. That is all going on at the same time, and often amongst the same group of people.

Phil Hope: I agree with what you just said: I think we have a problem here. Firstly, a consultation is also an educative process. The reason why it is valuable for people to be engaged in very many different ways on different things is not only so we can hear their views but also because it does engage people: they themselves find out information and their own views get changed as time goes on. So it is a dynamic process that I think is a very important process of building up a relationship between communities and the local authorities. The point you are making about multiple layers and things going on that are routed in different funding streams, I think is quite an important one, which is why we are taking considerable efforts now to reduce the number of plans, and therefore the number of consultations that have to take place, by merging them together, so you undertake one consultation around a set of plans rather than each one having, as it were, a separate consultation. Secondly, on funding streams, which often carry with them their own data collection - and you mentioned SRB and so on - the efforts to create local area agreements - and I do not know whether Sheffield has that or not: I am trying to remember where the pilots are - this is where some of the funds are being merged together to create single pots, and there is a lot more flexibility and negotiation at a local level about what outcomes all these various funding streams are achieving, and flexibility for people locally then to decide how that money is spent and they go into one pot. So you can actually streamline and limit the number of duplicatory processes that may be going on around consultation. I think it is difficult because different authorities are trying different processes at different levels to see what works. Certainly area committees, I have to say, are a very good way of getting a geographical, helicopter look at what is going on, as distinct from individual, as it were, services, and how they are being delivered. You probably do need both but the authority needs possibly to stand up and make sure it is not falling into the trap you mentioned.

Q262 Mr Betts: I recognise the idea of having a single pot: that was a recommendation of our report on urban regeneration a few years ago! There is a concern that maybe with all this consultation - and you have drawn the distinction between consulting people and the responsibility for taking decisions at the end of the day - people get the impression that this is where it really happens, and therefore it links into a decline in the turnout at local elections. Or is it the other way round, that because there is a decline in turnout there is a feeling that people are not engaging in that process and we go into the consultation process to try to engage then in a different way?

Phil Hope: I am a firm believer that more engagement with the community will increase turnout, will increase people's confidence in the democratic process, in the bureaucracies, the systems that serve and meet their needs, rather than the other way round. The logical conclusion to the argument you have put forward, or one side of that argument, would therefore be: have no consultation - except for the only time they get is once every four years down the election. I think all of us would recognise that would be a daft way of proceeding. I think it is very important for councillors, in between the elections of councillors, to be personally and actively engaged with their communities, identifying community needs, bringing forward proposals, taking back their ideas to the community, so that there is an active process of community engagement - and I do not just mean at the council level, as it were, at the strategic level. Our Leadership document talks a lot about the role of local councillors in their wards being a key part of that process of continuous engagement.

Q263 Mr Betts: There is a real issue here. There are more people engaging, certainly in my constituency, in local community groups, in consultation exercises - which is very powerful and proper. Fewer people now join political parties to engage in that way. Fewer people vote in local elections but more people come to councillors and members of parliament with their problems. There is inherent conflict in this.

Phil Hope: Yes. I am not sure whether the cause and effect are as you are describing them. I think there may be other wider reasons for the potential depression of turnout - although my understanding of the figures is that they are now going back up again. Arguably there are wider factors that are lowering people's expectations and therefore involvement in local politics - and I am think about the media in particular. There seems to be a view that they are all the same, it makes no difference. We all know how wrong that is, but there is that general mood that can exist and can be used as a political ploy by some to achieve a political outcome. I do not think we should fall into the trap of assuming that greater consultation on a more day-to-day basis undermines the formal democratic process. I genuinely believe that that process strengthens involvement in democracy: people know who their councillors are, they will be more motivated to get out there and vote for them because they have seen them and been engaged with them. Whether they like them or not of course is a matter for them to make a choice.

Q264 Sir Paul Beresford: You have just mentioned a minimalist level of consultation. Do you think there is a level at the other end? Do you think there is a tendency for some councils to find every excuse to go out to consultation and not to make decisions? They spend vast sums on vast armies of people running round consulting, and when everything comes back, they um and ah about it, and have further consultation. I am slightly exaggerating.

Phil Hope: I have not seen any evidence for the caricature you have just described. I understand the concern. I have seen that there are some councils which do it very well and there are some councils which I think could learn from other councils about doing both more of it and better. Not avoiding the problems we were describing earlier about multiple consultations with the same people over the same issues for different reasons, that I think can be a matter for the local council to develop. That is one reason, for example, why we have not thought about having a strategy code of consultation for local government.

Q265 Chairman: We will come on to that later.

Phil Hope: Fine. That is one of the reasons, because I think it is about local flexibility because different areas will do things differently and the process is important to get right, to be flexible for local areas. So I understand the concern but do not recognise evidence of what you have described. Our concern is rather that the quality is varied and we would like to see more councils, as it were, raise their game, so that there is good quality consultation, with all that might mean, by every council.

Mr Pottier: Again, I do not recognise the situation where there is necessarily too much going on, but I think the other thing to pick out of consultation is that it is part of a two-way process. As the minister said earlier, in any consultation there is an educative process. We know from some of our research that the understanding of many residents of what their local authority does and who is responsible for which services is not high. Therefore, in any consultation there is an opportunity to have a dialogue with residents and actually part of it is about educating as much as getting results back from the questions you ask.

Q266 Sir Paul Beresford: Do you not feel that in making that sort of approach you are only getting the same people to respond and that most people sit on their hands. It is the activists, without much to do other than reply to your endless dialogues and consultations etcetera, who are actually forming the structure of the responses.

Mr Pottier: To some extent that can happen but I think the better local authorities will have a range of techniques, so that they do not just get the usual suspects coming back with responses. There is a range of different things that can be used: citizens' juries, citizens' panels or area forums, and if they use a broad spectrum then they ought to be able to get out of the usual suspect list.

Sir Paul Beresford: Trusting soul!

Q267 Mr Cummings: How have the new council structures made it easier for people to become involved in local decision-making? Can you provide any practical examples where this has been the case?

Phil Hope: I mentioned scrutiny earlier, Chairman. I think there is an opportunity within scrutiny for consultation to happen, so that the new structure, where councils have taken on the overview and scrutiny role in a very proactive way, have taken a theme - healthcare or antisocial behaviour - and have gone out to the community in a scrutiny process to assess how those organisations are delivering that. Those local authorities have then taken very active consultative processes, gained information through the scrutiny process, and then presented that to the executive as a way of developing their scrutiny function. I think that within scrutiny itself there are good consultation processes. Secondly, in terms of what I call the non-executive councillor - the new structure created this sort of back-reach councillor, the non-executive councillor - we are seeing some evidence that they are taking much more seriously their ward representative role and are undertaking a lot more consultative processes within their wards and to champion their wards. Indeed, our Neighbourhood and our Leadership documents put this very importantly at the forefront of what we want to see those local councillors do, so that they are getting much more. It is strengthening rather than weakening the consultation process.

Q268 Mr Cummings: Who ordered the structures you just referred to? Is the information based upon credible evidence.

Phil Hope: The Comprehensive Performance Assessment process includes within it an assessment of the corporate governance of the local authorities. The new CPA process that is out for consultation at the moment, which they are deciding upon, within the corporate governance assessment of how well the local authority is governed includes an assessment of user focus and user diversity, to what extent the council is actually focusing on the needs of the users and the diversity of users in their area. That assessment will include an assessment of therefore how the authority is consulting and engaging with users to ensure the services meet the users' needs.

Q269 Mr Clelland: While I agree with what you have said, the consultation is not intended to be a referendum on decision-making. Perhaps because of that - we all know this from our own experience - there is a great deal of cynicism around about consultation. People often feel, "Whatever I say it is not going to influence the council," and in any case people go into these things thinking, "The decision has already been taken. This is just a paper exercise." Have you experienced that cynicism? If so, what do we do about it? How can we help local authorities overcome that?

Phil Hope: I do recognise that problem. It is important that where a council really has made a decision, then to go out to consultation, as it were, as a cover for a decision that it has already made does not fool anybody, least of all those people being consulted, and it would not be an appropriate thing to do. If councils have already consulted and made a decision, then to go out to consultation again, as it were, to affirm a decision they have already made,. and then it does not go the way they want it to, we see where that takes you. I do not think that is a very effective form of consultation at all. How do you prevent that? I think the guidelines that we have published as Government are helpful, in the sense of being very clear about why you are consulting, why you are consulting and to what time scale, being clear about the purpose of the consultation upfront, feeding back the results and then showing in your decision how that consultation has influenced or not influenced, depending on the outcome of the decision, and the reasons why. I think it was the Audit Commission who identified four or five critical success factors for a good consultation process, and one is, first and foremost, a commitment to the user, a commitment to consulting people and then building in key elements of, in particular, communicating well how the information will be conveyed and how it will influence the decisions. If that is not done, that is when I think problems can happen. It might be that consultation at the council level is better as a strategic activity but individual decisions, in the way that we might be thinking about, could lead councils into some difficulty, and it needs to be carefully thought through what is appropriate for individual decisions.

Q270 Sir Paul Beresford: Really we need to send that answer to the mayor of London, do we?

Phil Hope: I think I have tried to deal with the question of the mayor for London earlier. I understand your concerns about that. I would say that the mayor for London's consultation was genuine. The responses were properly considered and the decision made by the mayor of London was for the mayor of London. As I say, he will or will not receive the outcome of his accountability for that at the ballot box, and of course he has already been successful.

Q271 Mr Clelland: On that sort of example, where the local authority goes out to consultation and reaches the view that the overall opinion that those who are being consulted is not in line with what the council thinks properly ought to be done - like, for instance, the Congestion Charge - is policy that there should be better explanation given as to why the decision has gone a particular way regardless of what the consultation outcome was?

Phil Hope: If there is a direction of travel that the council has already taken and it is minded to take and it is consulting during that, if it says that in advance then people know where they stand. Ideally, consultation should be open - nothing ruled out and everything ruled in and then a decision being made. But if a council has already made a decision and wants to consult on the details of that decision and the way forward, then I think they should be upfront about that because to do otherwise would be to run the risks you have just described.

Q272 Mr Clelland: If the council has not made a decision, goes to consultation, gets the consultation, considers it, sits down with the officers and works out all the options, and says, "Regardless of this, we think is in the best interests to go this way," is the council then obliged to go back to the people involved?

Phil Hope: I certainly think it is good practice to go back. Certainly when I was a borough councillor and county councillor myself we did exactly that: having heard all the views, summed them up and done the analysis, then to say to the groups we consulted, "On balance, taking into account this guidance, these priorities, our views, the different views out in the community, here is the decision we have made. Here, on the balance of all those factors, including the views of the people we have consulted, we have come to this decision." With an honest process of doing that, people will then say, "Okay, they have made a decision that I did not agree with but I can see how they have arrived at that decision. I feel I have been properly treated as a consultee in that process." I just want to say, that is not an obligation and the guidance is only guidance.

Q273 Mr Clelland: But that sort of practice would build up the confidence of people in the consultation process and therefore dispel the kind of criticism referred to.

Phil Hope: I think that would and I think there has been evidence that is exactly what it does do. I can understand that maybe that asks councillors to do one more step, as it were, but all the evidence is that where that step is taken better decisions are made, because there is better clarity but also because more people have faith in the system.

Q274 Chris Mole: The Government is keen to encourage consultation using the internet and the world wide web. How should councils ensure that maybe a digital divide in standard access to such technology does not skew the results?

Phil Hope: First of all, there are more examples of that happening. I have even seen web casts of council meetings, for example, which have been with good audiences, so there is more openness and transparency in the system there. You will be pleased to know that we have a £4 million national project called E-democracy, led by local authorities, which is developing a whole raft of new ways of encouraging the use of electronic technology in a whole variety of ways for consultation to take place. It is proving to be very successful. It is deliberately aimed almost at closing that digital divide; for example, finding ways of engaging with young people through these new processes, using the new e-Government methods to engage and consult with young people. That was due to be launched this morning.

Mr Pottier: We are launching it these evening.

Phil Hope: I am launching it this evening, in fact - if I may re-write my own diary. That is led by local authorities and they will be piloting these models of good practice that others can the use.

Q275 Chris Mole: I would encourage you to look at the Suffolk graffiti wall in that context, which is aimed at young people.

Phil Hope: That is on the web.

Q276 Chris Mole: Yes.

Mr Pottier: There is a range of projects within the e-democracy pilot. I will give you a couple of examples which pick up your question. There have been a couple of ideas about how you could perhaps use schools or local EAZ facilities, so that you can actually bring parents into computers that children might be using as part of their everyday activity, so you can actually get to those traditionally hard-to-reach groups, particularly in deprived areas, in a way that they can take part in consultations through local community facilities. There are other aspects of it, so that, instead of using, say, the internet, it would be going down to using mobile phones and texting technology. This, again, is particularly aimed at young people.

Q277 Mr Clelland: One of the Round Six Beacon themes is Getting Closer to Communities. When the local authorities came before us they did not seem to be too clear as to how this might benefit local government. Can you say why this particular theme was chosen and how it is going to help local authorities to improve their quality and value of the consultations they undertake?

Phil Hope: The Beacon scheme has been very successful - this is Round Six we are talking about now - in identifying an area of good practice, encouraging applications for Beacon status and then spreading that more generally. We have chosen this theme because we do want to see, as I said, in terms of the local vision for local government and the ten-year strategy, this whole area of consultation, community engagement - everything from information providing through to consultation and active involvement in decision-making - to be a feature of how local government begins to look in the future. There is now, I think, sufficient good practice for us to launch this Beacon scheme, because then we can try to identify what it is that people are doing. In fact, there is a lot of good practice out there that does not often get captured: people are doing it but they do not tell each other that they are doing it. It is one of my big frustrations.

Q278 Chairman: Could you give us just one example of that good practice out there.

Phil Hope: Bristol, for example, thinking about an e-government example, have consulted using new technology on things like seagulls, safety, shopping. I know, seagulls was a surprise to me as well, I have to tell you.

Q279 Chris Mole: It was not the seagulls that were being consulted, was it?

Phil Hope: No, no, but consulting on the problem of how they deal with seagulls and so on. I am sorry, that was not meant to be a trivial example, Chairman.

Q280 Chairman: No. I understand that shooting seagulls is a major political difficulty.

Phil Hope: I think local authorities are much more engaged. If you look at the surveys now, I think something like 70 per cent of local authorities, over 70 per cent, now have active processes of consultation with their communities - whether it be through traditional methods, which I think are peaking - this is the turning up to meetings and so on - or more focus groups, surveys, e-surveys, questionnaires, panels, citizens' juries, citizens' panels. We list the variety in the written evidence we have submitted to you of how many councils are engaging. We are looking at hundreds of councils now taking on board these new approaches to consultation and doing so very successfully. I would say, far from saying I cannot find a single example, most authorities are doing something. Some are doing a combination of methods, which really do add up to a comprehensive and effective system of consultation. Others, as I said at the beginning, are not, and it is those we are going to need to develop.

Mr Pottier: In my previous role, if you want some concrete examples of some I have used, there was a community strategy where we invited 70 local residents in for a day, with the mayor, to assess the right priorities for the locality, and not only the right priorities but the right sort of targets we should set for revision in five and ten years time. A slightly different example was that our housing team wanted to put out a leaflet to inform people how they were going to change the housing service. They did not expect the group of 20 people we brought together to come back, but they turned round and said, "This leaflet, not only is it unclear, but we think elements of it are unfair to sections of the community, and bits of it balance on ...." it was not quite racism, but there were comments in there which they did not quite like. They basically said, "Go back, re-write it and come back to us in three months time." So residents do quite happily engage in those sorts of techniques and if you go to most local authorities you will find those examples happening day-in and day-out.

Q281 Mr Clelland: I am not sure if that answers the question. Why was that particular theme chosen? How will it help local authorities improve their performance in their areas?

Mr Pottier: Quite why the theme was chosen, I do not know. In terms of the benefit, one thing we are clear about is that some local authorities do consultation very well and there are others who clearly do not. There is good practice that can be spread and the key message for the Beacon theme is actually about helping local authorities learn from each other. So there are people doing it well. They apply and get a Beacon award, then they have that for a year and their task is to disseminate the good things they are doing to the weaker authorities. We have seen over four or five years now that there is quite a benefit that comes from them.

Phil Hope: Could I answer the question about why we chose the theme, Chairman?

Chairman: I am a little worried, that if we are going to get through all the questions we will need shorter questions and answers.

Q282 Mr Betts: Local authorities very often want to reinvent the wheel and devise their own forms of consultation, which are not new because other authorities have already done them. To what extent are we getting good practice transferred from one authority to another? Could you give one or two examples where you have been successful.

Phil Hope: I share the concern that people do that. A lot of local authorities do need to learn from each other. Are we encouraging that process? The IDA, for example, is one of the organisations the ODPM funds to try to promote best practice between local authorities. Indeed, the Innovations Forum that the ODPM established is another arena where local authorities that are excellent come together to share good practice. Those are two of the mechanisms that we have put in place and are funding to get local authorities to talk to one another and share good practice as to how they go about many things, including good practice in consultation. There is a slight difficulty, in simply lifting an example and saying, "They did it in Sheffield this way, let's do it in Bristol identically." Simply transferring it across like that has merit, but I think it is also important that the process is owned, because the doing of it itself engages the council in the process, in genuinely owning and being genuinely committed to doing it. Modifying and tweaking the methods, the combination that is right for you in your authority, is an important part of the process in itself, so that it is not a mechanistic experience; it is a genuine process that is being used. But I think there could be more done between local authorities to share good practice, and, as I say, I have mentioned two methods that are used to promote it. The Beacon scheme that we have just been describing is of course another.

Q283 Mr Betts: We have had two different types of evidence given to us. One is that there ought to be clearer guidance from central government, maybe with a mandatory code of practice on consultation for local government, in the same way that it has for central government departments. On the other hand, sometimes the individual consultation requested, not necessarily just from ODPM but from other departments, is far too prescriptive and not the right way to go about it.

Phil Hope: At the moment we are not minded to issue, as it were, statutory guidance and make it the law that a council must consult in this way. The statutory guidance you have been referring to is there - indeed, it is binding upon central government to conduct in that way. We think it is the best practice and we would like local authorities to conform to it. That is only prescriptive in the sense of the six main features of a good consultation process which I have been describing earlier, about being clear about the purpose of the consultation, clear about the process for undertaking it once the results are back in, feeding back what the consultation says and then showing how it has influenced the decision-making. That is good practice. The relationship between central and local government in this regard has to be one of guidance rather than direction because this is an important area. The reason that Getting Councils Closer to their Communities was chosen as a Beacon theme is because we believe that is the right way for local authorities to go in terms of meeting local needs and delivering better services.

Q284 Mr Betts: Do you have any monitoring to ascertain how far that has been taken up?

Phil Hope: The guidance itself says the local authorities should monitor. The Comprehensive Performance Assessment is the major method we use for councils to be assessed on their performance and the corporate governance part of that will include user focus and diversity. That is a reference to how local authorities are or are not being successful in consulting and working with a whole raft of different types of groups and individuals.

Q285 Mr Betts: Looking at the role of central government, we now have the planning act and the requirement for every local government to come up with effective consultation for planning methods in their area. We went to New Zealand a few weeks ago, and, as I understand it, the New Zealand model is that every local authority now is required to develop a plan for how it consults those affected on every single decision it takes as an authority. Each local authority does that. There is a mandatory requirement to do so, but in very general terms, and then how it is done is left to every local authority. They actually have to show how they are doing it.

Phil Hope: In the planning system in this country, as we know, there is now a requirement in law for a statement of community involvement in the plans that the local authority draws up, so in that area of the council's activity it is a statutory duty. The Housing Act, for example, insists that tenants are properly consulted and there is a lot of guidance on things like tenant participation in contracts and other things you will be familiar with, that ensure that there is good practice in terms of tenant involvement and participation, leading to better services, more cost-effective services. Local strategic partnerships is another arena where there is guidance for the local strategic partnerships, not only in the way that they consult their partners and work with their partners but also in their community strategies - we are calling them sustainable community strategies now - and the way that they are developed and need to go out to consultation. So within certain aspects - I have mentioned, planning, housing and the community strategy - there is built-in requirement to consult the community.

Q286 Mr Betts: You would not want to go further and make them a general requirement?

Phil Hope: Whilst we wish to see councils develop their best practice in this regard, I think there is that balance between central prescription and local flexibility. I think we have got that balance right at the moment.

Q287 Mr Betts: Central prescription is simply that others have to develop a planning framework consultation. It is not something the government would like to do. It seems good practice being written into a statutory requirement.

Phil Hope: As I have said, in elements of the council's responsibilities there is prescription. In other elements there is guidance. The "how" is for local flexibility to determine. Should there be an overarching on everything the council does to consult in the way you are describing in New Zealand? At this moment in time I am not persuaded that is the right route to go because of the importance of local flexibility.

Mr Pottier: Rather than central government needing to prescribe it, I think many authorities have started to go down this route of their own will anyway. Some of them are producing consultations.

Chairman: Perhaps we had better move on to the fact that there are people who are not carrying out best practice and something needs to be done about that.

Q288 Chris Mole: It has been suggested to us that the Government itself does not always adhere to high enough standards where it is asking local councils to carry out consultation reports. Are there any procedures in place to ensure that procedures and guidance set out by the Government for consultation to be conducted by local authorities is of the best quality?

Phil Hope: We have put together a number of different processes to encourage local authorities - prescribing some examples, in the way I was just describing, Chairman, in terms of planning and the Housing Act, but, in others, good practice guidance. We have the National Code that the Government adheres to. That is advisory to local authorities and we would like the local authorities to take it forward. The Audit Commission have published their five critical success factors. We hope local government would listen to that. We have introduced things like the Beacon scheme, which is a competition to highlight best practice and then to share that best practice. We fund bodies - I have mentioned the IDEA and the Innovations Forum as two examples where best practice can be shared.

Q289 Chris Mole: Clearly the local councils are being told, in some circumstances, by other government departments, "You must do this consultation this way" and they are looking at it and saying that this does not affect them.

Phil Hope: I do not know whether Mr Mole is referring to the DfES Children Survey.

Q290 Chris Mole: I was coming on to that.

Phil Hope: Why did I guess that, Chairman.

Q291 Chairman: I hope you were warned that we have had many discussions about what a shambles that was.

Phil Hope: It is obviously a matter for the DfES but I understand there was full consultation with local authorities about how they would undertake both the survey and the census, that local authorities did have an opportunity and did actively participate in the designing of both those activities by the DfES.

Q292 Chris Mole: But when the decision was made.

Phil Hope: As we know, we make a distinction between consultation and decision-making, Chairman.

Q293 Sir Paul Beresford: Alconian eyesight, again, is it?

Phil Hope: And genuine consultation - views were understood and listened to and taken into account - and the decision then was made about how to undertake that. As I say, this is a matter for the DfES. It is a difficult area because surveying the needs of children in care who are at risk is a difficult task to undertake anyway, so there was inevitably going to be some room for discussion and debate about the process.

Q294 Chairman: I do not think there is any room for discussion and debate. Some of these proposals are just appalling. If you were a foster parent, you would be shocked if your child received a questionnaire from the local authority without your knowing that that questionnaire was going to be sent out.

Phil Hope: I am not in a position to make a comment on how the DfES have conducted this survey.

Q295 Chairman: It is not how they have conducted it; it is how they have insisted, if you like, local authorities - for which you are responsible - have been asked to conduct it. The local authorities in many cases wanting to have a good consultation process have said, "We don't want to do this."

Phil Hope: I think that illustrates why there is nervousness and anxiety about, as it were, there being a prescriptive process for government as a whole in insisting that local government consults in certain ways on the whole of its remit. Which is why there are particular areas - and we have mentioned housing and planning - where there is an activity by one government department, because it is very keen to understand what is happening with a particular client group, asking local authorities to undertake a consultation in a particular way. The design of that consultation and survey was based on consultation itself with local government and local authorities. As I say, I cannot answer for the DfES final decision about undertaking this, but that it did consult very thoroughly I am assured did take place before it made its decisions - and I am again emphasising the difference between the consultation -----

Q296 Chairman: So, if you consult, that is an alibi for taking a poor decision.

Phil Hope: No, it is not. Consultation is a genuine effort to find out the best way of doing something and then a decision has to be made based on the consultation and all the other factors coming into that process about what is the right way forward.

Q297 Mr Clelland: We have been discussing how spreading best practice between local authorities might improve standards in consultation. As we know, they can vary greatly, but there is also a difference in standard often within the local authority between departments. Are these methods which we have been discussing going to improve standards across the board?

Phil Hope: Yes. I would hope - and again other members here have served on local authorities - that elected officers and senior officers who can see something working well in one department might well say that we could apply that to other parts of the process.

Q298 Mr Clelland: Do we have examples of this happening in practice?

Mr Pottier: Good question. One example of which I am aware is in fact in Lewisham - one of the groups you spoke to last week - where they have pulled a number of people into a strategic consultation group, so that they can look across the piece as to what is happening in the local authority, to try to ensure best practice in all departments and pull together all the consultation they have done to get the strategic messages out of it.

Q299 Mr Clelland: Is that the best practice we would like to spread to other local authorities? What mechanism is there for doing that?

Mr Pottier: Certainly it is something we would welcome, but whether it will necessarily work in every locality I think is an interesting question. One of the things for Lewisham is that they have a directly elected mayor which is a little bit different. Local authorities need to come up with an approach which works for them. That is one example which has been brought forward. But, again, I would not want to be prescriptive, but, yes, I think that is an element of good practice, particularly the bit where you can pull together consultations from across an authority and pull out the strategic messages, because with departments working in silos you can risk that not happening.

Q300 Mr Cummings: All three local authorities who have given oral evidence to the Committee emphasised the importance of proper training and appropriate skills for staff involved in consultation. To what extent is effective consultation undermined by a lack of the relevant resources and skills within local government?

Phil Hope: I think it is a matter for each authority to assess what its capacity is and what training it needs to put in place for those particular employees that have a lead responsibility for this, and establishing a coordinator around consultation within the local authority is something that local authorities are doing, and those individuals at a senior management level are usefully identifying how and where consultation can take place. They are assessing their own capacity in-house, as it were, as to whether they have the ability to do that, and then, where there is not, identifying staff training and development needs to develop those skills where they do not exist. So we have seen authorities taking that approach to addressing that problem.

Q301 Mr Betts: Do you have evidence that the present consultation exercise is being undermined by a lack of resources and skills?

Phil Hope: Given that the amount of consultation has increased significantly over the last few years, with many councils now taking consultation much more seriously, I can see that local authorities are, as they understand the importance of this approach, providing the necessary resources to make it happen. Where it is not being applied, where those resources are not being put in place, where the training is not happening, then, yes, I am sure that would undermine the ability of the authority to consult properly, but the evidence is that the direction of travel is that authorities are recognising that they need to invest in their staff to undertake these activities and that their staff development training budgets might usefully be used for this purpose.

Q302 Chairman: How many highway engineers have any training at all in consultation?

Phil Hope: Yes, I do not think we gather that information centrally, Chairman, although the fact that you are highlighting a particular area from your own experience suggests that there might be a training need there that others might seek to address.

Chairman: Thank you.

Q303 Mr Cummings: As a general view, you are quite happy the skills exist and therefore you would not wish to ensure yourselves that the local authorities have the right balance of skills by carrying out perhaps some form of audit.

Phil Hope: I think it is for the local authorities themselves to look at their own consultation processes and see whether they need to be improved, and then to look at the staffing skills and capability and capacity to deliver that consultation process and then to allocate from within their budgets the training that might be required and the resources required to deliver that. Those authorities that are genuinely wanting to see service improvement have already recognised that consultation is a key part of improving service delivery and therefore resources are being allocated to improve that part of their process for planning and delivering services. Those authorities that are not doing that are probably the authorities that are not delivering good consultation and therefore not getting that kind of service delivery improvement, and it is those authorities that we would like to see look at their own capacity, look at their training and see whether they could be doing more and therefore improving consultation as a way of improving services.

Q304 Mr Cummings: Who will ensure that they will look at that?

Phil Hope: As I say, the Comprehensive Performance Assessment will include, as part of its corporate governance, an assessment of the user focus of an authority, so that is one external assessment by the CPA.

Q305 Mr Cummings: Do you have any evidence to date of previous Comprehensive -----

Phil Hope: The new system does include a much greater focus on user-focus and corporate governance. The CPA that is currently, as it were, giving scores, does not include such a focus on this. Indeed, it is because it does not that we have had the repercussions.

Q306 Mr Cummings: Will it include focus in the future?

Phil Hope: It will indeed.

Q307 Mr Clelland: Do you know how many staff are involved or are spending a significant amount of their time on consultation activities? Do you know what the average expenditure on consultation by local authorities is? In other words, is the bureaucracy and the expenditure providing value for money? How do you measure that?

Mr Pottier: In short, we do not have that information. To come back to a comment that was made in terms of the staffing, to some extent actually local authorities will not necessarily use their own staff on consultation, they will bring in experts who are far better equipped at consultation. In a sense, collecting a figure about the number of staff on consultation may not help.

Q308 Chairman: Buying in does not guarantee that it is good value for money, does it? That was the question.

Phil Hope: Sure. I understand there is a figure of around 5,000 local authority employees that may be directly involved in this kind of activity, but I do not think that does take into account the point you are making, Chairman. Certainly, a service which is being reviewed in terms of best value has to include consultation as part of the best value process of ensuring a service has been delivered to best value. So consultation is not an option; it is an integral part of how you go about ensuring a service does give you best value. We do not collect the data centrally, however, on how every local authority is doing that, and there is a balance to be reached about not imposing too many requirements on, as it were, collecting information that becomes a burden on local authorities. Indeed, we are trying reduce the burden on local authorities for collecting data. That may be one area where we would not want to put in place a major data collection exercise for wish not to impose a burden on local authorities.

Q309 Mr Clelland: So consultation is an absolute principle.

Phil Hope: It is a principle that when you review a service to ensure a service is giving best value. I cannot conceive of how you can do that without asking the user in some shape or form what they think about the service and what improvements then would like. Otherwise you could redesign your whole service in a way that completely missed the interests and needs of the user. For me, it has to be an integral part of the process for ensuring the service is best value.

Q310 Chris Mole: This is a question of the degree to which costs should be considered by local authorities when working out what particular bits of research or consultation should be undertaken. Where should they draw the line between statistical purity of the research and the practicalities of consultation?

Phil Hope: I think it is for the local authority to make a judgment on, as it were, the quantitative forms of user consultation - and I am thinking here about surveys and questionnaires - and the qualitative approaches - the citizens' panels, area committees, focus groups and so on which get underneath and get into the detail of a particular issue but also give an opportunity to engage groups that might otherwise be missed in a wider, as it were, statistical process. I think it is getting the combination right. I do not think it is possible for central government to say, "When you are doing this kind of survey or this kind of consultation on this issue, you should do it to this cost and in these ways." It must be for the local authority to make that judgment based on its own area, on its own priorities, on its own policies.

Mr Pottier: There is no hard and fast rule. It depends on the issue you are going to consult on. It depends which groups you want to try to engage. Each exercise is going to be taken on its merits. You might reach a different decision on different occasions.

Q311 Chris Mole: So, as long as they are confident they have rounded picture at reasonable cost, they probably have it right.

Phil Hope: Yes. The difficulty in a rounded picture at reasonable cost is what is rounded and what is reasonable. But that has to be for the local authority to decide based on their judgment of the decisions

Mr Pottier: It is also worth remembering that you may have an issue which comes up today, but that is not to say you do not have a wealth of previous consultation and research that you have already done in the last two years which you could draw on, so again it affects your decisions as to how you take it forward.

Q312 Mr Cummings: The Government have been very keen to encourage local authorities to engage in consultation in areas beyond those which are required by statute. What allowance has been made to help local authorities fund these activities?

Phil Hope: On the first point - and this is very much part of a leadership document that has been published as a consultation document about the future of local government - we think that local government should play a community leadership role, rather than just worry about their own services that they deliver. That is why the local citizen partnership, for example, and sustainable community strategies have been developed, and why we want to see local authorities play that leadership role, bringing together partners, getting up in a helicopter and looking down at their area, across the board and not just for their own services. We think that is the right direction of travel, as it were, for government to be taking. We think that is the future for local government, that community leadership role. In terms of funding, there has been substantial extra funding, as members of this Committee will know, for local government. From memory, the increase in local government funding since 1977 has been 33 per cent in real terms, above-inflation increase, for local authorities. So there has been substantial extra funding provided for local government to deliver services and to undertake some of these wider leadership activities. Certainly I would hope that some of that extra resource that local authorities have now received would be appropriately deployed to carry out a wider community leadership function.

Q313 Mr Cummings: I fully accept what you are saying about the increase in funding for local authorities, and of course that goes alongside a whole raft of measures in which local authorities now have to involve themselves.

Phil Hope: Indeed. We have a policy, as the Committee will know, of not asking for any activities to be undertaken by local authorities that are unfunded, so for any new burdens that central government places on local government, the money has to be put in the pot, as it were, for that activity to be undertaken. But, as I say, consultation is not a bolt-on extra; it needs to be an integral part of how the council undertakes its activities in its community leadership role as well, and the extra funding we have provided does provide the necessary resources for local authorities to undertake that role - and, indeed, the good local authorities want to undertake that role and are doing so already.

Q314 Mr Clelland: You are saying that whatever the cost of the consultation exercise, the government will provide the money.

Phil Hope: No. There is a process for assessing burdens. This is a process of discussion and negotiation with the local authority OGA. In that discussion - and we have had many differences - we eventually reach an agreement and then that is reflected in the settlement that the local authorities receive each year.

Mr Pottier: In a number of areas where local strategic partnerships are working well, you may undertake a consultation exercise which is not only funded by the local authority but also the Police and Health Authority will also contribute to the consultation you are taking part in.

Q315 Mr Betts: We all hear from time to time about decisions that at a stroke could save local authorities thousands of pounds. In terms of consultation, we heard from the IDEA that they believed consultation could improve value for money, making services more cost-effective. Could you give any examples of that?

Mr Pottier: I cannot pinpoint specifically ... I am trying to think from my own experience. I think a very ready area where it can contribute is in the best value process, where local authorities are undertaking Best Value Reviews and need to consult local residents.

Q316 Chairman: We want specific examples of pounds in the till.

Phil Hope: Chairman, we may have to write to the Committee, to give specific examples costed to show this consultation saving this amount of money. Anecdotally, in the past there has been a consultation about warden services for sheltered accommodation, where the residents in that sheltered accommodation have been consulted about the nature, the style, the speed of, the location of the warden service. As a result of that consultation, the warden service has been redesigned. It has been more cost-effective in the re-design and that warden service has been quicker and better as a result, through a little bit of invest-to-save money, to put in technology which allows wardens to be signalled when somebody falls over or something goes wrong, as opposed to having a permanent residential warden without all of that approach. That is an example from my past, Chairman

Q317 Mr Betts: You will let us have one or two examples in writing.

Phil Hope: If that is the sort of thing, if that is a helpful way of thinking about it.

Mr Pottier: I am not sure that you can necessarily calculate the pounds per consultation.

Chairman: We do not want excuses. The question was specifically for examples.

Q318 Chris Mole: The datasets from MORI and subsequent surveys are going to a valuable resource for local authorities seeking to engage with their communities Why has it taken so long to release this data?

Phil Hope: My understanding, Chairman, is that the satisfaction survey was carried out over several months during 2003‑04 and authorities had to submit their returns by 31 March 2004. The data was then processed by the ODPM and we had to apply weighting to that data to get the national comparisons. Obviously you will understand that that is not a quick process. That data was then returned to local authorities for verification and the actual benchmark information was then released in June 2004, so I think that answers the question as to the total timescale that I understand has happened. It is a survey carried out every three years.

Q319 Chairman: So it is available now to everyone that wants it?

Phil Hope: It has been available since June 2004.

Q320 Mr Betts: We talked earlier about the amount of consultation going on and that perhaps it is a small group of people in the committee who get really involved in some of the exercises. Do you think the Government is doing enough to build capacity amongst the public for these sorts of exercises? Should central government be doing more to help in that?

Phil Hope: That is one of the definite additional benefits that comes from good consultation and that comes from building community capacity or social capital and encouraging and enabling people to become more empowered and get involved in their local authorities and - to come back to an earlier point - that encourages people to vote when the voting time comes. Could they be doing more? I think we have some examples of good practice in local authorities where there has been, not least through some of the housing activities consultation where tenants have been trained and supported in terms of participation in compacts and so on have been leading the way to engage tenants and equip tenants to not only have an influence over but in some cases sit on the boards of local tenants board and so on. We have got good examples in that particular field, for example, as well as others. I am sure ‑ I know ‑ that more could be done to ensure that not only in housing but in other forms of service delivery local authorities are much more actively equipping communities to take part and to have a voice heard, particularly groups like young people who often get excluded or overlooked in those kinds of activity.

Q321 Mr Betts: Is there more that central government could be doing? I think we heard about planning gain where I was initially contacted by my constituency and that seemed a good example where they can put training workshops on for local community groups, and giving them a bit of funding enables them to do that. One of the frustrations when people are consulted about planning issues is they do not understand the framework in which local authorities take decisions, so informing them is quite important. Are there any other ways in which central government can help stimulate that sort of approach where planning gains are adopted?

Phil Hope: I think it is absolutely right that understanding the planning system and the benefits that can come from it and getting engaged with that is a very fruitful area. What went through my mind as you were speaking was how Surestart, for example, which is very much a parent‑led approach to delivering services to young families in some of our poorest communities has not only improved the support and training and development for young children but parents have hugely benefited from their engagement because there has been a process of support training and providing qualifications and as a consequence of that most parents are more able to understand the complexities that things like the planning system can give. There are other developments like Surestart which I think will equip particularly in the most disadvantaged communities those groups that are possibly the least articulate and least understanding of how they can influence the system. It is having that impact and building the social capital in those areas and equipping those communities to have a great influence over a whole raft of local authority services and policies.

Q322 Sir Paul Beresford: I think we ought to come to the crunch that with the whole plethora of areas on which consultation, a number of witnesses have mentioned the phrases "consultation fatigue" and "consultation boredom", et cetera. Do you think there is a risk of that and how would you overcome it? Have you done any consultation on consultation fatigue?

Phil Hope: We have consulted on the consultation guide that the Government has introduced as a statutory code, so there was a consultation process on that. Do I think there is consultation fatigue? There was always going to be a risk that that could happen and that is what local authorities must be wary of. I think though that can be overplayed as a problem because where we are at the moment is some authorities are doing consultation well but many have got a long way to go in terms of using the variety and diversity and consultation techniques that add up to what I think was described earlier as a rounded and reasonable approach to consultation on any particular issue and rather than it being a process where people have got fatigue ‑ although I can see how that might happen with very long consultation processes over huge planning issues that might be in place ‑ we have changed the planning system to try and streamline it by ensuring that there is a statement that the local community has to be part of the planning process. In fact, I believe there is a need for more consultation in more authorities in a greater variety of ways to ensure that local authorities are genuinely meeting the needs of their local communities. Whilst I recognise the risk I do not accept the premise that is where we are at the moment.

Q323 Chairman: You think there is validity in some of the consultation. I bought a new car two years ago and there is one major defect with the car and that is about once a month I get a questionnaire asking me about my satisfaction of it. I used to throw them in the bin and I discovered that if I do that then a few weeks later I get a reminder, so the simple solution is put a few ticks and crosses into the boxes and send it back and they leave me alone. Do you not think some people treat consultation in that way?

Phil Hope: It is interesting that you quote a commercial example where clearly in terms of that company being successful it does believe that consultation is absolutely critical.

Q324 Chairman: It takes not a blind bit of notice about my random answers.

Phil Hope: I do not want to get down into whether they get it right or wrong but clearly consultation is important commercially and therefore that might be an indicator that consultation is important for the public sector too. In terms of the public's attitude to all of this, it is true to say, and I think there is evidence from the surveys we have done to show this, that something like half the population want to know that they can have a voice, that they can be heard, that information is available to them but they do not want to be actively involved. I call that "passive" consultation. As long as things are going well, as it were, and they know they can have a say if they need to, that is fine, and there is something like 24 per cent that want to be actively involved. They want to know how their council works, who is making the decisions, how they can have their voices heard, what influence they can have on the decisions the council is making. What is important though ‑ as we were trying to reflect earlier ‑ is that it should not be the same people all the time that are doing that, that there is a rolling ball here of people coming in and out of active consultation depending on their interest in a particular issue and what is happening. Local authorities that can recognise and know their communities well and can engage as appropriate so they are not receiving, as it were, mindless questionnaires for no reason, they are targeted and involved through different processes as appropriate to suit the policy or the issue that is being consulted about, seems to me a much more appropriate way of behaving.

Q325 Chairman: Do not you think very often local authorities end up consulting the wrong people? Let me give you an example. The Select Committee had a visit on empty homes in the last Parliament and we saw some houses in Harper Head (?) which had been modernised in exactly the way we were told the original residents wanted those houses to be modernised. The problem is that those original residents had moved away and what those houses ought to appeal to was new residents who of course have had not been consulted and gave those particular houses the thumbs down.

Phil Hope: There will always dilemmas, Chairman. It is almost impossible. How do you know who to consult if they are not there to be consulted because ‑‑‑

Q326 Chairman: --- Is that not the problem for a lot of local authority services that you need to find out the needs of future people rather than the people who are here now?

Phil Hope: I think it is an iterative process. In other words, you might consult the current population that you are serving about their needs and priorities. That population may be changing for demographic reasons and so on and therefore you need to consult again. That would not, to my mind, be consultation fatigue; it would be to reflect accurately in the services you provide the needs of demography and the priorities of the population that might be changing. Certainly with communities changing more rapidly in different parts of the country having therefore sensitive systems for consulting the new arrivals, as you describe them, is a very important part of how a local authority needs to conduct its business.

Chairman: On that note, can I thank you very much for your evidence.