Consultation after the decision is a photograph, not a question.
The most confident decisions I have watched being made about a group of people were made by people who had never sat in a room with any of them. Not out of malice, and usually not out of laziness either. Distance just feels like objectivity from the inside.
How it happens
Nobody sets out to decide about people they have never met... it is simply the default. The decision gets made where the budget and the authority sit, and those rooms are a long way from where the effect lands. What arrives there is a summary of a summary.
Distance flattens. Read enough case notes about a cohort and your head assembles a composite person who does not exist anywhere. Then the design gets built for the composite. And the composite is always more reasonable than anybody real. It has one problem at a time. It can attend appointments. It answers its phone.
What consultation gets used for
Then the thing goes out for consultation.
By that point the money is allocated, the model is drawn, and somebody has already told a board it is happening. What is genuinely open is the wording.
I sit on a disability advisory committee. Most of what comes to us is well meant, and some of it is very good. But you can tell within a minute whether a paper has come to be tested or to be endorsed. Papers that come to be tested arrive early and unfinished, with the awkward parts still in them. Papers that come for endorsement arrive polished, with a launch date already on the last page.
Consultation after the decision is not a question, it is a photograph of some people sitting near a decision.
The people in the photograph know. They are not confused about what is happening. They keep turning up anyway, out of politeness and to protect the small amount of influence they do have, and the organisation reads the turning up as agreement.
What the room changes
Being where the effect lands changes the questions, not only the answers.
The first visit tells you what the problem is called. The second one tells you what it is. The first visit is a performance on both sides. People give you the tidy version, because they are managing you, and that is entirely reasonable. You are a stranger with a folder.
Come back and the tidy version cracks a little. That is where you find out the form is fine but the office is only open while they are at work. Or the service is good and the car park is impossible. Small, boring, decisive facts that no summary will ever carry.
What to do instead
Move the consultation earlier than is comfortable. Bring the draft with the holes still in it. If you would be slightly embarrassed for someone to see it, that is about the right stage.
Then report back on what you did with what you heard, line by line, including what you rejected and why. People can live with no. What they cannot live with is being asked once and never hearing the question again.
And go twice. Not to the launch and then the review. To the ordinary day in the middle when nothing is being opened and there is nobody there to see you.