In Little Dorrit, Dickens introduces the Circumlocution Office, a fictional government department whose function is to tie up public business in so much procedure that nothing ever happens.
“If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match,” we are told, “nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.”
The sentiment is obviously shared by those at the top of government.
Last month the chancellor, first secretary and attorney general wrote a three-page letter to all ministers which is boldly titled the Simplification and Agency of Government. In it, they report “three areas where this government will act with greater alacrity […] to pare back counterproductive administrative burdens”.
One key area is the government’s plan to cut down significantly on public consultations. They will do this by repealing “thousands” of laws requiring ministers to consult before taking particular actions, emphasising that “there is no general duty of consultation”, and suggesting that even an established practice or expectation of consultation should carry little weight unless it would be “conspicuously unfair” not to do so.
This sounds like excellent politics: who does not like the idea of “cutting red tape”? The very reason why the Circumlocution Office is funny is because British people are always going to be suspicious of bureaucracy and waste in the exercise of public authority. The letter leans into that suspicion, describing “box-ticking” as a “distraction” that causes “dither and delay”.
But the letter picks the wrong target. The response to delay and box-ticking is not to scrap consultation; it is to improve it.
Participatory policymaking
The moral premise of government’s argument is that ours is a representative, not direct, democracy. Parliament and ministers must be able to make decisions rather than constantly referring decisions back to the public.
But the point of consultation is not to “pass the buck” or transfer responsibility away from government. It is to make sure the decision is well-reasoned and likely to achieve its goal.
Many charities/not-for-profits see engaging with consultations on relevant topics (or helping their beneficiaries to do so) as a valuable way of advancing their objectives.
It allows them to ensure that decision-makers have the benefit of their particular expertise and knowledge of what’s happening on the ground; they can often offer ideas, or flag risks, that hadn’t occurred to anyone in Westminster.
Public policy that is detached from this kind of frontline insight risks running into practical problems, unintended consequences, and a lack of buy-in from the very people who will often be called on to make it work in practice.
The letter to some degree acknowledges this, promising to promote “participatory policymaking, involving a wider range of people in shaping our thinking earlier and more directly”.
And the government, at the same time, is extolling the benefits of the sector participating in the formation of policy through its Civil Society Covenant. Published last year, this states that civil society “respects the legitimacy of government to make decisions”, but government “listens to and respects civil society’s varied expertise in the course of policy and service design”.
Bad consultation
The problem, if there is one, is bad consultation. Consultation where the outcome is already settled. Consultation used to justify inaction. Consultation that excludes relevant people. Consultation that enables a small, unrepresentative group to obstruct an otherwise justified proposal.
There may also be a hint in the letter of frustration with the increase in charities and campaign groups encouraging their supporters to send template consultation responses en masse.
A recent Defra consultation on biodiversity net gain, for example, identified 95% of its 25,000 responses as having been part of an organised campaign, most prominently those run by two large charities.
But such responses can be usefully grouped together and given appropriate weight, and the strength of public feeling they demonstrate is in itself a useful data point.
Either way, the solution to these problems is to improve consultation, not to take it outside of statutory frameworks and turn it into an optional add-on.
Public law already requires consulting authorities to give consultees sufficient information, and engage meaningfully with their responses.
Government could use statutory frameworks to strengthen those requirements, and clarify (for example) how AI can appropriately be used in assessing responses, and what weight will be given to duplicate or template submissions.
By advocating for informal engagement that isn’t subject to legal requirements, and encouraging decision-makers to develop a higher tolerance for risk, government is simply making bad consultation (and bad policy) more likely.
That in turn is likely to generate more judicial review. Rather than doing away with the “administrative burden”, government may simply be displacing it from the consultation process to the courts.
