Home page Should consultations be legally significant? Any one with some experience in large government projects both here and in other countries has some notion of the degree to which political parties make use of government contracts as a means of syphoning off public funds into political party coffers. Clearly it isn't always as simple as that. It can be that someone with sufficient influence over the decision making in the selection of the successful bid in some tender can benefit personally by favouring a company who has lobbied to convince the individual of where their personal interests lie. Others may look the other way if this individual "facilitates" things the party wants to do. This is a complex and interesting area for study and essentially involves the laundering of public funds into private funds as a source of "legal" private donations. Consultations One of the ways to detect this process is obvious bias in the selection of policy solutions proposed by government. Usually, public "consultations" consist of deficient documentation with introductions which make use of obscure political arguments and assertions as to what constitutes a "better deal" for the public. Recent examples include the governemnt's failure to carry out an adequate review for justifying nuclear energy. Others include the road charging proposals and just about any large investment scheme undertaken by the government from education to public health and information technology. Legal precedent? Since in the case of the nuclear "consultation" the government was criticised and called to task by a judge, there are those who now suggest that this should not be a matter of a court to decide. But when it comes to the use of public monies there exist means of detecting "induced bias" in decision making and when this exists, it is a matter for the law. Decision analysis The George Boole Institute recently sponsored the organization of the Institute of Systems Engineering Economics (ISEE). ISEE was formed to run online workshops on decision analysis and solutions to sector problems using state of the art information technology. ISEE workshops will not only involve "talks and docs" but will design and implement working online solutions as "proof of feasibility" of all selected proposals. Workshops will be supported by briefs which outline specific issues of importance in acheving effective and transparent decisions. ISEE has already announced its first workshop which will address decision analysis in feedstocks, fibres and food, a very complex area covering issues of relevance to WTO, the Doha Round, biofuels, the environment, developing countries, EU and US subsidy policies and even genetically modified (GM) produce. Critical information The briefs for this first workshop will appear at the end of this month and three of them will address issues of relevance to the dilema introduced above. The dilema being, how do we know when the government employees, political parties or others are cheating and feathering their own financial nests through government contracts and using useless consultations to simulate some form of participatory involvement of the electorate? The three briefs are entitled: Private & public monies Ethics & professional standards Law & evidence Private & public monies Private and public money issues cover the relative degrees of freedom a private body has in spending its money in comparison with those handling public money such as central government and ministries. In the private situation the so-called decision maker preferences remain those of the owner of the money. However, decision maker preferences in the case of public money is a matter where competent public oversight is fully justified and indeed, recommended. Ethics & professional standards The issue of ensuring adequate oversight means that the process of decision analysis needs to be undertaken in a professional manner by experienced sector specialists. The reliability of information used depends upon the professional standards applied by the specialists employed to undertake the work. This involves quite serious ethical issues of practitioners being provided with sufficient independence (see footnote) as to exercise professional responsibility in applying and recording a transparent decision analysis and describing the process of assessment of all feasible options. Law & evidence Clearly consultations can provide such information to the public where bias would be easy to detect. On the other hand, it is apparently possible to take good decision which can have a disappointing outcome. No matter what, not achieving objectives will be considered to be a poor decision. This is why thorough decision analysis information is of importance as evidence at law so as to review aspects of liability associated with poor private and/or public decisions. This is of importance because it can provide evidence to prove political corruption, professional bias or incompetence and grounds for third party tort in those cases where members of the public have been harmed by unexpected outcomes. We should all remain equal before the law There are those who would prefer that governments manage and take their decisions and that consultations become essentially infomation exercises announcing a fait accompli. But in the case of public monies this is very much the business of the people and, indeed, of the law. Footnote: This is in marked contrast to many government and political party-funded reports where the management consultants are provided with a clear indication of the preferences of their client. As a result a lot of the argumentation favours the client's predefined position and often this ends up with a report which is referred to as "an independent consultant's report" but which is thoroughly biased. ISEE web site