A: There was one consultation.
This has been confirmed in a letter to Lord Saatchi from Health Minister Earl Howe on 22 January 2015 in which Lord Howe states: “It was agreed in advance with the Department views captured through the online petition and embeddable web form would be considered.” See letter in full below.
From Feb 2014 – April 2014 the Department of Health ran a public consultation on an earlier draft version of the Medical Innovation Bill. You can read the report here.
Following the consultation and taking feedback on board the Bill was presented to the House of Lords. It has since been robustly debated and amended. In particular an open access database of all treatments under the Bill, both positive and negative is now included in the Bill. The Bill passed to the House of Commons on 23rd January 2015.
The Bill team met the Department of Health (DoH) several times to discuss the Medical Innovation Bill consultation and the best way to make it accessible for as many people as possible.
At those meetings, the DoH made it clear that it wanted a strong response from the public and professional bodies alike.
Accordingly the Medical Innovation Bill (MIB) team and the DoH agreed and proposed to and set up various channels by which individuals, patients, doctors and organisations could respond.
Some of these channels would be managed by the DoH and others by the MIB team. Our combined effort working to drive a big response to the consultation.
These channels included open public events (held in Leeds, London and Cardiff), the standard DoH hosted online response platform, online conversations through, for example, DoctorDot.Com, a dedicated Department of Health email address (standard practice) and a written address to which people could send their own thoughts.
The DoH also suggested they host twitter chats via WeNurses, which they have done for other consultations – although this never happened. Another channel by which people could respond was an embeddable widget that allowed people to respond either positively or negatively to the consultation and leave an in-depth comment if they wished. And a petition on Change.org that also enabled people to leave a comment if they wished.
Both the widget and the Change.org petition sent responses directly to the DoH. The widget captured expressions of opinion both in favour of the Bill and against. Neither the widget or the petition responses were intercepted, manipulated or changed by the MIB team.
The DoH team made it clear, by prior agreement, that all responses, received through any of the above channels, were both desired and welcome whether they answered all questions fully, or whether they were direct emails, or conversations designed to capture sentiments and views in a less structured way.
By prior agreement with the DoH the MIB Bill team set up and managed the embeddable widget and the Change.org petition. After the consultation closed even though the DoH should have received all the response in real time direct from the widget and the change.org the MIB team also sent all the of consultation responses received via these two channels in one consolidated email along with a detailed description of the pre-agreed methodology.
This approach, that is using multiple channels to respond to a consultation, has many historic precedents and is not new.
Examples of previous Department of Health consultations where responses have come from multiple channels.
Example 1: Consultation of standardised packing of tobacco products: Summary Report July 2013
Extract from Chapter 2 pg 8
‘Campaign responses. A number of campaigns were run that encouraged multiple respondents to answer only a handful of consultation questions (many campaigns only addressed whether standardised packaging of tobacco should be introduced or not). These responses used identical template documents (typically postcards, emails or letters), a single letter signed by multiple people or were received in the form of a petition.2 In total, 665,989 responses were received in this category.’
The two campaigns that provided these responses were run by Cancer Research UK and Tobacco Free Future.
Example 2: Consultation of the future of tobacco control – December 2008
Extract from Pg 8:
In total, more than 96,000 responses were received. The majority of these were pre-written postcards or e-mail campaigns.
The phrasing was often generic, for example, “I support measures to protect our children from tobacco marketing.”
The DoH team agreed the above approach at a meeting with the full DoH team and the MIB team (Dominic Nutt, Liz Scarff and Daniel Greenberg).
The details were fleshed out and agreed in depth on a subsequent meeting with the DoH digital communications team with Dominic Nutt and Liz Scarff a few days later, again at the DoH office in London.
This has been confirmed in a letter to Lord Saatchi from Health Minister Earl Howe on 22 January 2015 in which Lord Howe states: “It was agreed in advance with the Department views captured through the online petition and embeddable web form would be considered.” See letter in full below.
It has been wrongly claimed that the MIB team was wrong to state those responses were part of the consultation and has intentionally mislead the public and media by stating this.
However, the MIB team’s statements have been substantiated by Earl Howe’s letter. All responses, through all channels, were together, in unison with the DoH and in express and advance agreement and encouragement by the DoH.
It was in the clear and mutual interests of the DoH and the MIB teams to work together to gather opinion and was part of the ‘one team’ philosophy developed by the DoH and the MIB team.
→DOWNLOAD: Letter to Lord Saatchi from Department of Health Final
