Newsletter, March 2010

Contents this month

• Main article - Engaging beyond boundaries
• Project news

Project News

DH Consultation on a Future Strategy for Adults with Autistic Spectrum Conditions

This consultation aimed to get input from people with autistic spectrum conditions, their families, carers, and those working to support them in professional care. The submission stage of the consultation ran from April until mid-September 2009. Following this Dialogue by Design embarked on processing and analysing the responses. The consultation proved to be extremely popular with the number of responses totalling over a thousand. Following the analysis of responses a report detailing the findings of the consultation was published.

The consultation was offered to participants in two formats, one as the standard consultation and one in an easy to read format, which explained things more simply, using less text and shorter sentences alongside pictures to illustrate points. The purpose of this was to enable submissions from people who wished to contribute their thoughts and experiences to the consultation process but who might find a more traditional-style consultation document off-putting or difficult to use. This decision appeared to bear fruit as approximately a quarter of participants took the opportunity to take part in the easy read version.

The review stage, allowing participants to view submissions online and download all the relevant reports was launched last week.

Please contact Hannah Vernon for more information.

Environment Agency Coastal Communities 2150 and Beyond

It is predicted that, in the next century, European coastal communities will experience significantly higher sea-levels than today, with major impacts on those communities and beyond. The Environment Agency is preparing a funding bid to the European Union for a 3 year project, 'Coastal Communities 2150 and beyond' to develop and test ways of communicating with and engaging communities at all levels in responding to this challenge.

On 3rd November 2009, Dialogue by Design were asked by the Environment Agency to design and facilitate a workshop with 25 potential partners from England, Belgium, France and The Netherlands. The purpose of the workshop was to explore the impacts and related challenges of major sea level rise on the communities represented and consider how CC2150 could address some of them. In undertaking this work Dialogue by Design were greatly aided by the range of languages spoken fluently by their staff and associates, in this case both French and Dutch, as well as their experience of living in these respective cultures.

Please contact Isabelle Guyot for more information.

Code of Practice for Alcohol Retail

Dialogue by Design were asked by COI, on behalf of the Home Office, to carry out the analysis of a multi-strand consultation about the retailing of alcohol in England and Wales. The consultation was around proposed new legislation - a code of practice - that would further regulate the sale of alcohol and which the Home Office believed would reduce alcohol-related crime and disorder. The consultation set out a number of proposed conditions and asked whether stakeholders and members of the public would support them, and whether they believed they would be effective.

The Home Office ran a public consultation as well as a series of events for stakeholders in late 2009. Simultaneously, additional research was done to gauge the public's opinion on some of the issues. The consultation responses were collated and analysed by Dialogue by Design. We integrated the responses to the consultation with the findings from the other strands of research, producing a final overview report which informed the Home Office about the main issues that emerged from the entire range of consultation activities.

The report and the response from the Home Office are available online:

• Overview report by Dialogue by Design
• Home Office response

Please contact Remco van der Stoep for more information.

Surrey Minerals Plan

In the autumn of 2009 Dialogue by Design were asked to provide a multi-consultation process for Surrey County Council. The process embraced consultations on four different planning documents related to Surrey's Minerals and Waste Development Scheme.

The specific challenges of this consultation process were:

• For two of the planning documents which were at publication stage, we had to prepare paper and web response forms which complied with a set of specific requirements from the Planning Inspectorate. These requirements, while helping to structure the process of examining the planning document, are not necessarily easy to understand for members of the public. We worked with Surrey County Council to make the response forms as clear as possible
• Dealing with responses which either did not have clear references to consultations or consultation questions, or referred to more than one consultation, or had to be placed under an additional consultation since the contents were relevant beyond the consultation under which the response had been made. We tailored our electronic processing system to these requirements, allowing for additional processing information to be entered in order to ensure a clear audit trail

Please contact Erwin Juenemann for more information.

Thames Water Customer Research Workshop

Thames Water held a workshop in autumn 2009 with a group of their customers to understand their current attitudes and priorities. The outputs of this workshop helped Thames Water prepare their response to Ofwat's Draft Determination.

The participants were an independently recruited representative cross-section of Thames Water's customers, recruited by Dialogue by Design's partner Silver Dialogue.

Dialogue by Design facilitated and reported on the workshop which explored the issues of sewer flooding, leaks, metering, maintenance and bill profiles.

This was a qualitative research process and therefore the number and proportion of participants expressing specific opinions was not counted.

At the workshop, Thames Water staff were on hand to provide information. Representatives of the Consumer Council for Water primarily observed the day, commenting on some of the issues raised and answering questions posed by participants. A representative from Ofwat was also present and took part in a question and answer session to represent the Ofwat view.

Please contact Sarah Alder for more information.

'Towards Zero Waste' - A consultation on a new Waste Strategy for Wales

Dialogue by Design were asked by the Welsh Assembly Government to help them consult on their draft Wales Waste Strategy 2009-2050. Key themes were the need to reduce the amount of waste produced overall, as well as cutting the amount of material sent to landfill using methods such as increased recycling and reuse.

To help WAG get input from stakeholders and the public Dialogue by Design developed a multi-strand process, encompassing three stakeholder workshops and an online consultation that ran in summer 2009. A particularly notable aspect of the project was that it ran in two languages - English and Welsh. This bi-lingual approach was evident across the project, including the online consultation which was available on two parallel websites in each of the respective languages.

Dialogue by Design analysed the responses to all the different consultation strands and provided reports for each of the three events, for the online consultation, for an additional consultation for young people (which we did not run but analysed), and eventually an integrated summary report bringing the main points of all these reports together. In a second phase of the online consultation respondents can now view each others' responses. Where responses were submitted in Welsh an English translation is provided alongside. The results will be used to help shape the development of the waste strategy.

Please contact Erwin Juenemann for more information.