Government departments and agencies are being given a new code of practice on how to carry out consultation. The code, published by the Cabinet Office will come into force on April 1st and will replace one that has been in force since November 2000. The new rules will apply to all public consultations by government departments and agencies, including consultations on EU directives.The code has been made shorter and clearer and is designed to be easier for departments to use. It has also been drawn up to strengthen the government’s commitment to providing the people and organisations who are being consulted with feedback and to ensure departments follow better regulation best practice in developing policy.

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People working for local authorities that have been rated as excellent get more satisfaction from their jobs than their colleagues in other councils, according to a new survey conducted for the Improvement and Development Agency. The study found wide variations in the attitudes of staff linked to the performance of the councils for which they work.The full results will be released next week but initial findings reveal big differences in employees’ satisfaction with their jobs and workplaces in councils rated ‘excellent’, ‘good’, ‘fair’, weak, and ‘poor’ in the Comprehensive Performance Assessment exercise.

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A panel was set up in the Strategy Unit in 2001 to distil the experience of pilot trials for potential policy changes. This report summarises the findings of the panel. The recommendations add up to a strong endorsement of the case for piloting new policy initiatives. They provide enthusiastic support for the fact that the practice is now being embraced so widely across government. The report recognizes that some pilots are costly and timeconsuming, but the overall benefits they provide to good governance far outweigh their disadvantages.Pilots fulfil an important defensive role in guarding against the inclusion of embarrassing, often expensive and preventable mistakes into new policy initiatives. They also play a highly constructive role in promoting innovation and in helping to fine-tune policies and their delivery mechanisms in advance of their national roll-out. In short, policy pilots have become an indispensable tool of modern government. The report recognizes that, excellent though some practice already is, there is still a long way to go before this will be uniformly true across all administrations and departments . A great deal of practice still falls far short of its potential.

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