Consultation

Consultation is an essential part of service planning and delivery. The Council is required to demonstrate its public engagement when being audited from a number of perspectives.  

Corporate Co-ordination and Support

It is important for consultation exercises to be co-ordinated across the Council. Please contact Alison Mirpuri or Andy Stovold in the Community Partnerships section for further advice and guidance.  Useful information can also be found on the Equality and Diversity page.

As part of co-ordinating our consultation work, the groupshare folder holds a consultation database, which details key information about TRDC consultations, and an equalities database which details the demographic profile of respondents to TRDC consultations. These are living databases and need your input - when you complete a consultation, please email Alison Mirpuri your reports (overviews of the research and method, equalities information, main findings and charts rather than the large consultation documents themselves). Alison updates the databases and indexes on a monthly basis, which provide a home for this information and a resource that all of us can draw on.

Designing and Delivering Consultation - Guidance and support

Getting consultation right is not easy. You need to be confident that you have included the right people, asked the right questions and that the results are reliable. You need to end up with results you can actually use to make decisions.

This consultation handbook will help you to get the best out of your consultation work for TRDC.

In addition, more specific Equalities Monitoring Guidance can be found on the Equality Mapping page.

Consultation Commissioning form

This form has been developed to help you capture the information you need to design and feedback on consultation exercises and identify any support you may need.  Please complete this form and return it to Alison Mirpuri for further support.

Consultation Strategy

This can be downloaded below, together with the latest Consultation Action Plan. 

National Code of Practice on Consultation

This Code sets out the Governments code on formal public consultation exercises.  It has no statutory status with local government but updates previous best practice standards.  'The Seven Consultation Criteria' on page 4 may be particularly useful when considering a consultation exercise.

Duty To Involve

The new duty which comes into force in April 2009 requires authorities to take those steps they consider appropriate to involve representatives of local persons in the exercise of any of their functions, where they consider that it is appropriate to do so. It specifies the three ways of involving that need to be covered in this consideration:

• providing information about the exercise of the particular function
• consulting about the exercise of the particular function
• involving in another way

You can find out more in the statutory guidance from the DCLG: