Town & Country Planning, November 2012
If the American political system, which just delivered us a president again, encourages negotiation – because that is what the separation of powers requires – I have often wondered what the British system encourages.
Pomposity, certainly. Debate, probably. But the absolute powers it usually hands to administrations seem to me to encourage the gentle art of doing nothing about a problem for decades, followed by riding roughshod over everyone suddenly at the end.
It ought to provide the powers necessary for crises in a way that the American system does not, and certainly Gordon Brown had room for manoeuvre that his fellow world leaders lacked when the banking crisis exploded in 2008.
But unfortunately it doesn’t work like that nearly as often as it should.
I was reminded of all this by the strange story of the controls on the import and transport of ash trees. The first signs of the disease appeared in England in February and for some bizarre reason the controls were not announced until October.
Whatever else it was, it was hardly ‘Action This Day’.
But if you ask what they were doing all that time, the answer was: they were consulting on what to do.
It is fascinating how the business of consultation – and it certainly is a multi-million pound business these days – has been subsumed into the process of government, perhaps deliberately, to lengthen the time it takes to take a decision.
In fact, the meaning of the word consultation has subtly shifted in the years since I was at the editor’s desk of this venerable publication. In those days, ‘consultation’ is what we aspired to – in planning decisions and in so many others.
Now the word has been corroded, rather like ‘social security’, to mean what officials organise once they have decided what to do.
I have even run across examples, as we all have, of genuine consultation happening after official consultation, in order to try to give the demoralised and miserable process a little weight.
The first decade of this century was enough to undermine the whole concept of consultation in the public’s mind. But at the same time, it was also unravelling in the official mind.
As the century turned, I became involved in the voluminous consultation over the new development at Elephant and Castle in London. It was hugely ambitious and involved a whole division of committees made up of local residents – or, as it seemed to me, professional consultees.
It wasn’t a happy experience. The consultees took upon themselves a strange affronted pomposity in all their dealings with the council. Relations deteriorated. The consultation unravelled.
Consultation seems to be regarded as practically vacuous on both sides, and it is hard to see how the idea can be rescued from the fate reserved for it in the 1971 cult film The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, about a pollster who becomes Prime Minister and fits a consultation alarm onto everyone’s television.
In the middle of the night, the alarm flashes and the voice says: “Your government wants to know your views on the Seychelles”. Rimmer is voted absolute powers on condition nobody is ever consulted again.
There is another problem about consultation. It assumes that our only attributes which the government needs to run society is to occasionally tap into our brains – and we all know, as they know, that only applies to some of us.
What is apparent in most overstretched public services is that almost everybody is needed, and not for their opinions but for their active help – visiting people out of hospitals, reading in schools, keeping an eye out for older people, you name it.
This is known as the ‘co-production’ debate, and there is an almost alchemical idea behind it. Because once people are involved in that way in hospitals, surgeries, schools and care homes, their relationship with the professionals changes.
They are not consumers, they become equal partners in the delivery of services. I can’t help feeling that this is also a potential way back for public services, through these parallel institutions – time banks, village agents, community navigators – that are primarily designed so that everyone can play their part.
We also know that, when consultation is really done in a vigorous, imaginative and open-minded way, as it was famously in the development of a plan for Seattle in the 1990s, people are pleased with the result.
After two years of almost incessant consultation, phone-ins, school competitions, radio debates with the mayor, over three quarters of people felt they hadn’t been consulted enough – which might produce a wry smile for anyone who has been involved in this kind of thing.
But the same proportion approved of the plan.