CHAPTER 7
Coming to a judgement and providing feedbackAsking stakeholders, the general public or hard-to-reach groups about your budget proposals represents a great challenge in consultation. However, it is only part of a process of decision-making to which the end goal is the setting of the budget and the delivery of services, actions and benefits that meet the needs of the local population. Consultation does not remove a council’s need to come to a judgement and take the new budget forward. It is also vital to feedback the outcomes of the budget consultation to those who have been consulted. This chapter examines both these issues.
Our aim in presenting this guidance has been to encourage all local authorities to develop their current practice on budget consultation and develop a more systematic approach to the issue. What individual authorities decide to do is a matter for local choice and circumstances. Whether your consultation plans are limited or extensive, a crucial element in consulting effectively is to develop a sustained approach. The challenge is not necessarily to do the same thing each year but it is to do something each year in terms of effective consultation.
Building up an expectation among those you consult that they will continue to be consulted again ensures that a framework of trust will grow. In Sutton, the research team found that one of the factors in their success was that they had managed to increase the quality of their dialogue over the years. The sustained approach had helped to break down cynicism, and make interested parties feel they are contributing to debate. As one Sutton councillor commented:
“It doesn’t happen overnight, but years of demonstrating that if people say something it does have an influence… does have an impact. They might get what they want because they shout loudest or because they’ve got the longest petition, but things change”
This chapter argues that councillors need to consider three issues so that their consultation exercises are brought to a successful conclusion and are able to be run on a sustained basis year after year:
recognising the challenge of judgement;
balancing the responses received from the stakeholders and the public;
feedback of their judgements to the public.
MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF JUDGEMENT
Consultation is about providing councillors with more information in order to help them come to a judgement. Even when a referendum is, in practice, binding there has been a prior process of political judgement about what options are acceptable to be put before the public. In the case of the deliberative consultation techniques outlined in chapter 5, it is necessary to build into the timetable, sufficient time for the council to decide what budget it is going to adopt.
Consultation can make coming to a judgement easier. It is not an extra layer of complexity, but rather an opportunity to provide criteria to steer the judgement process. Budgets by definition involve making choices between priorities – what to cut or where to spend. The results of consultation exercises can help in making judgements by providing additional information about stakeholder or more generally public opinion:
what is acceptable to the greatest majority;
how the same end can be achieved through a different and, perhaps, less painful means;
where the top priorities for spending lie.
All of this information provides a more systematic and less ‘hunch-driven’ base on which the judgement of the council can rest.
The need for judgement, however, is not removed. No matter how extensive the consultation process, there will still be many choices to be made by councillors with the advice of officers. The pattern of responses produced by consultation may not be clear-cut. There may be developments or issues that arise since the consultation, which must affect the final judgements about the budget. Consultation does not remove the ultimate responsibility for coming to a judgement from elected members and their advisors.
BALANCING RESPONSES
The opinion of stakeholders and the public on the council budget options is unlikely to be one marked by complete uniformity of view. A crucial task for any council is how to balance opinion. If you follow the advice of these guidelines, you might have gone through consultation processes that reveal the preferences of stakeholders currently involved with the council, a wider representative group of the general public and a selection of some of the hard-to-reach groups. Not only might there be divisions between these different components of your consultation strategy; there is also a strong likelihood of divisions within these groups. In short, it is unrealistic to imagine that those you consult will speak with one voice. Moreover, different consultation approaches may throw up different shades of opinion. There are several dimensions to consider:
Balancing stakeholder and other opinions
There is no set rule to follow here. Each form of opinion that you gather has its strengths and weaknesses. It is up to you how you take on board the different opinions that are expressed to you:
– Stakeholders are more familiar with the council and what it does and can present a considered and informed set of reflections on your budget proposals. But they are equally likely to protect their own interests and perhaps defend past budget commitments.
– The general public, if they are consulted appropriately, are likely to reveal a representative reflection of opinion in your area. However, that opinion may be based on a relatively broad brush understanding of the issues at stake and perhaps a tendency to overlook the demands of more the less popular but still needed services.
– Hard-to-reach groups bring their own powerful and often overlooked insights if they are consulted properly, but equally these opinions may reflect their particular circumstances and preferences and will need to be balanced against the other opinions.
Balancing deliberative and representative techniques.
This is a key dilemma. On the one hand, it is appropriate when consulting the public over budgets to construct forms of consultation that encourage reflection based on an informed understanding of the issues. At the same time it is important to consider the representativeness of the feedback you are getting. People need to have information and perhaps to make choices, weighing one preference up against another. Equally though, the broad voice of public opinion has strong validity.
Small group discussions may allow the complexities to be investigated or encourage the voices of hard-to-reach groups to be heard. But, what should be the response if these views do not chime with the preferences revealed by more general surveys of public opinion? Should those consultation techniques that reveal uncomfortable answers for the local authority be swept under the carpet? No – we would encourage the greatest amount of openness about revealing the responses achieved through different consultation techniques. The decision about which opinions to follow rests fairly and legitimately with the council. Consultation is there to inform and help a council’s elected representative and their advisors in their decisions about budget matters. The decision over which options to put to the public, even in the case of a referendum, rests with the council. The interpretation of the results and findings again is a matter for the council.
Assessing split public opinion responses from surveys and referendums
There is a particular problem about large-scale tests of public opinion that reveal a fairly even split in opinion with no absolute majority emerging. In the case of referenda, Croydon’s solution was to ask for a second preference in respect of three options provided to the public. In practice, the second preferences of Croydon’s residences have never been brought into play, since in both 2001 and 2002, one of the budget options achieved an overall majority in the first round of counting. Another approach was taken by Milton Keynes, where the vote for a higher budget option was added to the middle option in order to give an overall majority for one option.
Both these approaches for allocating preferences can be defended. They are preferable to the practice of looking at a 35:32:33 vote split over budget options stretching from low, medium and high and suggesting that the public clearly chose the first option. When it comes to tests of opinion over budgets (whether informally through surveys or more formally through referenda) it would be better to have either a second preference expressed, or an agreed means of combining preferences advertised prior to the survey/voting. People would then at least understand the rules under which their preferences were going to be counted.
FEEDBACK
It is one of the great truisms of advice on consultation that it is vital to feedback the results to the public. Truism it may be, but it is not easy to deliver effective feedback. The choice to make is whether you are feeding back what you have learnt from different sources or rather what you have decided in the light of the consultation exercises you have undertaken. The latter strategy is probably the one that should be adopted. The real challenge in feedback is to show people how their views have been taken into account. It is not necessary to explain every last choice made by the council in the light of a complex budget-setting process and an equally complex set of opinions provided through consultation.
In short, feedback is about communication and the general lessons outlined in Chapter 4 of this document apply. The task at hand is to present information to the public and stakeholders about the decisions that have been made and the way their views have been taken into account. Some of the key points to consider are:
Using existing channels of consultation and communication that the council already has to hand, ranging from presentations to various forums to any newsletter, newspapers or websites that the council has in operation.
Use the established external media (both print and broadcast) to get the key features of the budget across and demonstrate the impact that consultation has had.
Use imaginative and innovative techniques to get the message across that the views you have collected have made a difference. This might range from poster campaigns to a special event to publicise what has been decided and why.
In effect, your commitment to feedback takes you back into the next round of consultation over the budget. The feedback that you give will provide the launching pad for next years consultation in at least two senses. First, it can provide information that helps people better understand the financial and budget position of the council. Second, it can help to convince people that their views make a difference and so encourage them to engage in the next round of consultation.
Published 4 July 2002
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