Carrying out a statutory or written consultation

Traditional consultation activity has historically been based on written surveys, often rooted in the statutory duty to consult. While this toolkit is not primarily focused on these approaches, they remain an essential pillar of our work. They can be an important part of your participation strategy if conducted well. Both written and statutory processes can also be successfully combined with other methods to give people different opportunities to contribute.

It is worth considering the community’s broader experience of these processes, and how they can be enriched with other approaches to participation. If you know that you have to conduct a statutory consultation, consider what the impact of this is on the issue you are working on in the eyes of the community. How will the process affect your relationship with affected residents? Are there wider issues at stake than those in this immediate consultation?

In circumstances where a written consultation is an important part of your strategy, here is some guidance on making it an effective process:

• If you are sharing text with communities, consider how to make it easily readable
• If you are writing a questionnaire or survey, consider these tips for best practice
• If you are trying to collect opinions and information from communities, consider if other techniques should be used alongside or instead of a survey.

For an example of combining statutory consultation processes with an ongoing participation strategy, see this case study.


Below is a prompt question to help you consider how much the statutory process gets to the issues that are important to the community.