We’ll all have heard it. The cry goes up from a disgruntled stakeholder who found a decision not to their liking. “How can you decide that way?! Only 3% of the local population responded to your consultation! That’s hardly anything to base your decision on…” It’s usually from someone who didn’t help boost that number by responding to the consultation one way or another. A couple of weeks ago I was on an advisory panel for the not-for-profit Localis, in advance of their new report “The Connected Society”, to be launched next week in Birmingham.

One of the points I made in that session was this very one. So often we see response rates being criticised without stakeholders appreciating that in a lot of cases 3% is actually quite a good response rate. Alongside “But the majority said the opposite thing!” and “The consultation was too short, I’ve read it should be at least twelve weeks” it forms part of an unholy triad of consultation misunderstandings amongst the general public. There are others too, but those are probably the most common that can be categorised as misunderstandings rather than potential complaints.

There is, it has to be said, a lot of misunderstandings out there with regard to public consultation. There are many reasons for this. Partially it’s probably due to the general lack of understanding of politics and society in the country. Partially it’s those who have not got the decision they wanted desperately scrabbling for anything they might be able to use to call a decision into question. Partially it’s a suspicion of public authorities. Many reasons, all of them contributing to consultation professionals having to spend time explaining their work.

This got us thinking- what (other than the ones we’ve mentioned already) are the big misunderstandings that you find yourself spending time dispelling in your work? And how might we be able to improve public understanding of public consultation basics to not only help ourselves, but also to help the public better and more effectively respond to our exercises? Many of you will be aware that we have not long started our own podcast, Consultation off the Cuff, which we’re hoping to use as a platform. Send us over your examples and ideas, and we’ll try and pull together an episode to discuss them- maybe we’ll even have some of you on as little vox pops to share your thoughts!