A key element in Ofcom’s engagement with consumers is its consultation process and this has always been a great interest of OfcomWatchers. Ofcom has an extensive consultation programme with around 400 consultations last year, but the number of responses varies enormously. The consultation on number translation services (NTS) elicited a record 2,000 responses, while the most low-level exercises attract a mere 20 submissions. Typically, for a major consultation like the strategic review of telecommunications, there will be 100+ responses. However, the vast majority of consultation responses come from companies or specific interest groups. There are very few from ‘ordinary’ consumers or citizens. This is not surprising, given the length and complexity of many of the consultation documents, but it is something that concerns the Ofcom Consumer Panel and indeed Ofcom itself.

There are different elements to the consultation process and one needs to consider the different factors in play at each stage:

• How people become aware of a particular consultation exercise
• How people can access a particular consultation document
• Whether people understand the issues under consideration
• How people make submissions to consultations
• How those responses are processed and accessed
• How people become aware of the outcome of the consultation exercise
• How interested parties are enabled to make the connections between different consultations and different parts of Ofcom.

Ofcom is currently taking several useful steps designed to improve the consultation process:

• It has developed a fully on-line consultation form borrowed from the US’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This should be standard for all consultation documents by the end of this month.
• It is developing a tracking process to enable users of the Ofcom web site to find more easily responses to particular consultations. The target date for rollout is the end of March.
• It is adopting a unique reference number for each consultation exercise, a docketing system again borrowed from the FCC. This will be linked to internal records management docketing systems, so that in future every document - whether internal or external - will have a unique identifier. The target date for this is the end of March.
• It is planning that all submissions will go straight into a database that publishes the submission automatically on the web site and enables it to be ‘mined’ by Ofcom staffers. This is actually a complex process and has to intersect with some other work to be undertaken under the Project Unify umbrella, Ofcom’s major multi-year workstream to overhaul or replace more than 50 legacy IT systems. The target date for implementation is the end of December 2006.

Ofcom needs to think innovatively about other means of improving consumer engagement in the consultation process. Ideas that it could consider include:

• Making better use of Ofcom’s own Advisory Committees (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Elderly & Disabled)
• Making better use of the Consumer Forum on Communications convened by the Consumer Panel
• Proactively seeking views from organisations or individuals that it would expect to have an opinion on the subject
• Seeking views on specific issues or questions from certain bodies or individuals, rather than giving the impression that one has to tackle every question to make a useful submission
• Using a standing panel of citizens - which might he actual or virtual - to test responses to major consultations
• Puttting plain English summaries of major consultations in places where ‘ordinary’ people are likely to see them such as supermarkets
• Creating on-line discussion forums or blogs to have focused, time-limited public discussions on key issues in major consultations
• Routinely advising electronically all those making a submission on a particular consultation when the outcome of that consultation is put on the Ofcom web site
• Creating a system of ‘account managers’ whereby people at Ofcom actively encourage engagement of assigned sectors across the board of different consultation exercises.