The House Opinion Article | The Professor Will See You Now: Recycling

Illustration by Tracy Worrall

4 min read12 min

You are unlikely to have heard of the Maresfield recycling centre, although you may have correctly surmised that it is a recycling centre based in Maresfield. Just down the road from me, it is to recycling centres what The Moon Under Water pub was for George Orwell. Helpful staff. Well-run. Easy to use. Takes almost anything. With – and this bit is key for what follows – rarely any queues. A bit busy at weekends, but even then, I’ve never waited for long.

So, imagine my surprise when the council launched a consultation about introducing a booking system, arguing that it would reduce waiting times.

I was even more surprised when the consultation questions arrived. They included this zinger: “Do you want less queuing at our sites?” The response options were yes or no. There was no question asking: is queuing a problem? It is now stored in the folder I use for teaching, full of examples of dodgy polling, dubious graphs and similar; the folder is entitled ‘Only The Lib Dems Can Win Here’.

The cynic in me had therefore begun to wonder whether the consultation was quite as genuine as it purported to be. But I did my civic duty and responded, as did almost 6,000 other people – a record for the council; of those responses, 91 per cent were negative.

Given the overwhelming weight of views against the proposal, the council did the only thing possible and nixed it.

I made that last bit up. What happened – and let’s face it, this doesn’t come as a surprise to you – is that the council pushed ahead regardless.

It seems invidious to name the council involved (although for the record it is East Sussex county council), because it’s not a one-off. I’ve taken part in three consultations like this, and in each case it was pretty obvious that the consultation was merely providing cover for what had already been decided.

Now, I know that consultations are not referenda; they aren’t just about weighing the responses. We don’t know whether respondents are representative of the wider population. And some views may – for perfectly good reason – carry more weight than others. There may well be valid justifications for this policy; the council claim it will save money. And, in the end, this is a political decision for which councillors are accountable at the ballot box. All true.

Still, I do wonder about the effect that these Potemkin consultations have on the public – and their sense of political trust and efficacy. 

This is normally the point in the article at which, like some second-rate psephological magician, I whip out from the hat a piece of research demonstrating either the obvious (this stuff damages public trust in politics) or – and the editor prefers this – the counter-intuitive: you might think , but guess what? Clever folk have shown not to be true! 

But this time, I can’t. This is partly a comment on how nationally focused so much research is; local government is too often the Untermensch of political science, despite its importance to voters. No one even seems to know how many of these damned things there are each year – yet Sussex alone seems to have had over 70 – let alone looked into their effect. Somebody should.

But I am reminded of a fascinating piece of work from a few years ago on the public petitions process in Scotland, which found that what the author called “process evaluations” were much more important than “outcome evaluations” on levels of political trust. Those who saw a process as fair and meaningful were far more likely to accept the outcome (even if they did not “win”) than those who saw it as unfair and meaningless (even if they did “win”). 

Folk didn’t mind not getting their way, as long as they felt they had been dealt with fairly. It’s not obvious to me that many local consultations clear that bar.

Further reading: C Carman, The Process is the Reality: Perceptions of Procedural Fairness and Participatory Democracy, Political Studies (2010)