Opinion: Government consultations can be a smokescreen
© Adobe Stock Taking part in government consultations is, I imagine, a bit like consulting your teenager on a reasonable bedtime.
The teen thinks midnight is “fine”, but you have other ideas.
So you offer three options: 9pm, 9.01pm or 9.02pm, invite everyone to debate and vote – parents, grandparents, teachers, even the teen – and announce: “This is inclusive and democratic and everyone’s opinion matters.”
The outcome may vary, but never enough to matter. This is how government consultations work.
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About the author
At a recent ministerial meeting, a fellow chair of a meat industry organisation asked, with admirable lack of varnish, what the point of these consultations was because government never listens anyway.
Cue righteous indignation from ministers – of course we listen, they exclaim – while a room full of people silently complete the sentence: “… and then do what we wanted anyway”.
The skill in writing a consultation is framing the questions so there’s no room for an answer that doesn’t fit the author’s ideology.
Take last year’s bovine TB consultations: seven, as far as I can recollect, two of which I was involved in.
There was plenty of good stuff on what farmers can do to help themselves, how best to instigate “risk-based trading”, biosecurity and such.
What was missing, at least in those I saw, was anything on the efficacy of targeted badger culls – their part in reducing TB in the high-risk area to the lowest level since 2006, or how they might be used going forward.
It is at times like these that I question the probity of this government. Political expedience will always trump evidence, and consultations will reliably deliver the result desired by their authors.
Which leads to a thorny question: if consultations are such an open goal, why did the Treasury fail to consult the industry on its proposed changes to inheritance tax (IHT)?
We’ll all be aware that Cambridgeshire farmer Tom Martin – an all-round good egg with a brain the size of a planet – has challenged the government in the High Court over its failure to consult before introducing major changes to tax policy.
I suspect the government’s failure to follow due process occurred because, despite all the time in opposition and the gap between the election and the first Budget, policy was still being formulated on the fly and there was simply not enough time to consult between the birth of the harebrained idea and Budget day.
The judgment is expected sometime in June.
If the ideology is that farmers are a burden, then every decision – from extra taxes on pickup trucks to IHT or SFI – is made through that prism.
While dealing with the third global financial shock in six years, we in England are almost alone in Europe in still disincentivising food production.
The last assessment of UK food self-sufficiency, in 2023, committed to maintaining 75%; it currently sits at 62% and falling.
If UK agriculture is the Titanic heading for an iceberg, this government is less rearranging deckchairs and more firing torpedoes.
On this basis, an honest consultation might be: how many torpedoes shall we fire?
The answer can be any number you like, as long as it’s enough to sink your aspirations along with your ship.