A government department’s open consultation on whether to extend its own open consultation has closed with a record number of responses, making it the most-engaged-with consultation the department has issued in the current fiscal year — and considerably more popular than the regulatory review it was originally designed to support.
The original consultation, which sought public and stakeholder views on proposed changes to a national framework, ran for twelve weeks and closed with 412 responses. Officials described the figure as “lower than anticipated” and determined that the evidence base was insufficient to proceed with confidence. A secondary consultation was subsequently published, asking respondents a single question: whether a twelve-week extension to the original consultation would, in their view, provide adequate opportunity for the evidence base to improve.
The secondary consultation received 1,847 responses within its first fortnight, prompting a departmental spokesperson to describe the level of public engagement as “encouraging” and “reflective of an appetite for inclusive process.”
The department is now reviewing those responses to determine whether the strength of feeling expressed in favour of an extension constitutes, in itself, a sufficient evidence base to proceed — or whether a further round of analysis is required to validate the secondary findings before any decision can be made on the primary question.
An internal briefing note, summarised in correspondence seen by this publication, indicates that while the high volume of secondary responses is broadly welcome, the department must be “careful not to conflate enthusiasm for process with agreement on substance,” and recommends a short analytical phase to establish whether respondents understood the question in the way it was intended.
A subset of respondents who participated in both the original consultation and the secondary review have been categorised separately as “engaged legacy participants,” with their responses to be weighted according to criteria that have not yet been finalised. The briefing indicates this is to avoid any perception that familiarity with the process had influenced views on whether the process should continue.
The department confirmed that a summary of the secondary consultation findings will be published in due course, subject to review by an independent panel tasked with confirming that the summary accurately reflects the consultation and not, inadvertently, merely the consultation about the consultation.
No timeframe has been indicated for that review. The original policy question remains open.
