Take care when seeking changes to time-honoured traditions.

It began as an innocuous proposal – similar to many in the world of public services.

Father Christmas merely announced that henceforth, his organisation would accept online requests from children all over the world, but phase out traditional hard-copy correspondence.

How could they have anticipated that this would be seen as a significant service change? And that Overview and Scrutiny Committees in the UK (and their equivalents elsewhere) would deem the change as damaging to the health and wellbeing of children everywhere.

A consultation was demanded, and Santa Claus found that relying on the North Pole Productivity Council’s recommendation cut no ice when the case for change was outlined in the proposal document. The Children’s Commissioner complained that there had been inadequate stakeholder involvement in the options development process and that children themselves had not been engaged in pre-consultation dialogues.

In fact, a co-production exercise had been attempted as Santa operatives and elves ‘toyed’ with various suggestions and sought to hammer out various compromises. Government policies now all required a presumption of digital by default, and what was once the Lapland Post Office had now become the Laptop distributed call centre. Modernists claimed that few children now knew what a postage stamp looked like and s.claus@northpole.com was a well-established email address.

A Focus group of young children concluded that going digital was ‘no big deal’ and that it should be possible for most kids aged 2 and over to communicate satisfactorily on the net. When mothers and fathers were engaged, however, a very different result emerged as they expressed major concerns that they would not know what their children had requested. Alarmed by the drift of the argument, they sought help and were devastated to learn that parents are not a protected category under Equality legislation!

They went to Court and argued that there must be a status-quo option in the consultation. Parents everywhere had a legitimate expectation that their children must continue to develop and display their best handwriting skills in the annual letter to Santa Claus. And transparency demanded that the correspondence was visible to parents before Black Friday. A new postcode-finding red-nose radar fitted on Rudolph was already being trialled; surely this was pre-determination?

The consultation was a sham!

On behalf of Claus & Co., the learned QC argued that a precedent had been set when working practices changed twenty years ago and Santa was relieved of the task of abseiling down chimneys on the grounds of ‘elf’ and safety. On that occasion, there had been no consultation, just a few ‘drop-in’ centres! Father Christmas, the defence argued, could not expect to remain immune to the forces of globalisation and digitisation. Subject to future trade negotiations and the avoidance of a hard-border necessitating custom checks for reindeer-pulled sleighs, the age-old operation should be allowed to modernise like everyone else.

Then a particular consultee response emerged. Nicholas was a saintly child from a seldom-heard family, and he claimed that the new policy could not be fair to those who were yet to acquire digital equipment. Surely, he asked, an exception had to be made for children asking for their first tablet, or i-pad or i-phone?  Santa was mortified. How could he have overlooked these youngsters? Why hadn’t anyone thought about them? Can anything be done?

The experts got together, and invited Nicholas to join them as an expert witness. Soon they agreed that where necessary a special counter of the Lapland Post Office would remain open to handle such letters. It became known as the counter-proposal, and was adopted by the S Claus Committee in Common, fully justifying the expense of the public consultation.

Nicholas was happy; Parents were happy; Santa Claus was happy. The Judicial Review was stopped in its tracks, so some of the lawyers were less happy.

But children the world over can rest assured that if they write a letter in the time-honoured way, it will be read and processed.

Thanks to a consultation!

The Consultation Institute wishes its members and supporters (of all ages) seasonal greetings and hopes for a Happy New Year.

This is the 332nd Tuesday Topic; a full list of subjects covered is available for Institute members and is a valuable resource covering so many aspects of consultation and engagement.