Bristol City Council's Consultation Finder
February 2003
Not for the first time a local citizen recently e-mailed to ask how can I find out about the consultations effecting people in my area? The only difference was this time we were able to offer a positive response - use Consultation Finder!
Aims of the Involvement
Bristol City Council makes a significant investment in public consultation. Over recent years the council has initiated many high quality and high profile exercises ranging from a citizens’ jury to consider the fate of the city’s ageing network of swimming pools through to a complete city-wide referendum to determine the future level of council tax. The lessons that the council has learned from consultation formed the basis of the Public Consultation Strategy that was adopted by the council’s Cabinet in September 2001.
Despite the council’s good work in the area of public consultation it was accepted that the risk of any individual or group becoming over-consulted was growing. In reality, the council was not in a position to meet one of the pledges it had signed up to in its own Contract with Consultees (an important part of the Consultation Strategy) – not to unnecessarily ask the same people the same questions over and over again.
The proposal was to plug this knowledge gap by bringing together details of all council public consultations in to one place and at the same time, making it easy for people to access and update information - to see what consultation is planned, what is current and what has been done before. Following six month’s work, Consultation Finder emerged as an innovative solution.
Consultation Finder is located on the consultation pages of the council’s website bristol-city.gov.uk. It is accessed via a user-friendly interface, which enables an easy search through past, current and future consultations. Searches can be made to find out who is consulting and why by using crosscutting themes as search headings, or to find all consultations impacting on particular wards. A ‘lookup’ facility is included so that people can identify their ward and their ward councillors and find out about schools and local events.
The council’s Consultation Strategy highlights the need to provide sufficient background information about the issues being consulted on, to allow citizens to offer an informed view. Consultation Finder provides on-line access to background papers that are relevant to individual consultations. To make participation convenient Consultation Finder also includes the facility to link to e-surveys and forms as an addition to, rather than as a replacement for more traditional consultation methods. One of the net outputs of the council’s Consultation Strategy over time should be greater public interest in local governance. For this reason, Consultation Finder enables people to register their ‘stake’ in consultations that have yet to start – subsequently to receive an electronic reminder when the consultation begins. Finally, the council’s Consultation Strategy recognizes that in order to sustain public interest and involvement over time, the council needs to demonstrate real and tangible outcomes from its consultation programme. Through Consultation Finder people can access brief summaries of consultation results and link to pages showing how consultation is being used to inform and improve council decision-making.
Who was Involved?
A multi-disciplinary project team was established to take the project forward. This brought together the council’s project management, database and web development expertise with corporate and departmental consultation champions. A secondment was arranged from the voluntary and community sector to help develop the content of the finder and to build links with those involved in front-line consultation activity. The team worked closely throughout the project designing, developing, testing and modifying the system, which was built up from scratch. This was simply because, as far as anyone could discover, no other Local Authority had developed a similar system before, highlighting that what we were attempting was either very brave or very stupid!
How Were Participants Involved?
From an ICT perspective – the initial challenge was to pin down consultation into a system that could be consistently defined, coded, assimilated and accessed. However, it soon became apparent to all that consultation can be a ‘slippery notion’ and that not every consultation has a start date or every method a response rate (yes - really). Through listening and responding to issues raised in face-to-face meetings and discussions with those involved in consultation activity, the team extended its depth of understanding. The challenge that emerged was to make Consultation Finder broad enough to hold details of all consultation approaches; everything from statutory consultation on planning issues through to community based regeneration schemes whilst at the same time, maintaining an accessibility and user-focus.
What Methods are used?
When is a stakeholder conference not a stakeholder conference – when it is a visioning exercise. Included in Consultation Finder, when it went live, was a definitive list of all consultation methods used by the local authority. The list has of course continued to grow, reflecting the authority’s healthy willingness to try something new. However, for the first time, the reporting functions that are built into Consultation Finder can identify which consultation methods are being used most frequently by the council at any given time. For example, the first Consultation Finder monitoring report shows that in the first quarter of this civic year 24 public consultations were active and that focus groups, on-line and sample surveys, the citizens’ panel and conferences were the consultation methods most commonly used.
What has been achieved?
Consultation Finder went live in May 2002. It currently includes details of more than 60 consultations that the council and its partners have initiated. Council monitoring shows that 500 people (external to the council) browsed Consultation Finder during its first full month of operation. Whether this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a matter for debate but what we do now have is a baseline from which to establish progress in e-consultation over the months and years to come.
In summary, we believe that Consultation Finder is a Local authority first. Through the creative work of a multidisciplinary team we have taken a big step towards co-ordinating information about consultation across the authority and beyond. Over time, we anticipate that Consultation Finder will lead to less duplication in the consultation that is carried out and perhaps less consultation overall. However, we believe this is a good thing but only if those involved in consultation feel confident that their work is genuinely needed and that there is a way to communicate the results and findings to those who are interested or who have been involved. Consultation Finder provides a tool to help the council develop the confidence that its consultation work is needed and to help local citizens to feel confident that spending time offering opinions to the council is genuinely a worthwhile thing to do.