A few days ago I received an invitation to respond to a consultation on a cultural framework for the city. The email related to a consultation which was scheduled to take two weeks. This seems a rather short period for people to have time to read the documents concerned and then respond in an effective manner. However what made this process even more restrictive was that the email arrived 6 days after the consultation period had begun, so the amount of time for a response was reduced down to 8 days. I recall when the Labour Party were last in Government, that they set out a commitment to try to allow 12 weeks for consultations wherever possible. They often failed to achieve this but 8 days is clearly a totally inadequate period.

I confess that I did not even get a chance to look at the email until after the 8 days were over!