Consultation Watch - keeping an eye on consultations from UK Governmental departments

Back in 2012 I wondered if there was a single online place, on the Gov•UK website, where people could find out about all the various governmental consultations that were currently open for input. Since then, yes, it's here -

1. Get Involved
- information about all sorts of ways you can be that bit more civic-minded, which includes information about submitting a response to consultations.

2. Open Consultations
- this link takes you straight to the page of open consultations. [RSS feed (opens an atom file)]

I was reminded of this recently because I missed hearing about the government's consultation into bias in medical devices, which was announced in November 2021, launched in August 2022 and closed in early October 2022. There was quite a lot of fuss kicked up when Sajid Javid announced it last year with people opining that it was all nonsense (it isn't) and the Daily Mail also wrote about it. There was so little fuss about the actual consultation that I missed hearing about it until 3 weeks after it closed and only because I went looking for it after writing a related article for the work blog.

To help me keep an eye on this sort of thing I've created an automated Twitter account, called @ConsultationsUK (had to be less than 15 characters so couldn't use ConsultationWatch alas) which I've set up to send a Tweet whenever a new consultation is added to the Gov UK's website. See Technical details below for an explanation of how.

Department or country-specific consultations

I searched on Google using both the following search strings

inurl:gov.uk inurl:consult
inurl:gov.uk inurl:consultations

and this returned several departmental pages and also pointed me to country & county pages too.

• DEFRA - https://consult.defra.gov.uk/
• Education - https://consult.education.gov.uk/
• Environment Agency - https://consult.environment-agency.gov.uk/
• HSE: Health & Safety Executive - https://consultations.hse.gov.uk/
• Levelling Up - https://consult.levellingup.gov.uk/
• Ministry of Justice - https://consult.justice.gov.uk/
• Policy Papers and Consultations - https://www.gov.uk/search/policy-papers-and-consultations
  

• Scotland - https://consult.scotland.gov.uk/ aka https://consult.gov.scot
• Wales - https://gov.wales/consultations
• Northern Ireland - https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/public-consultations
• London - https://consult.london.gov.uk/

Local examples (there are many more)

• Harrow - https://consult.harrow.gov.uk/
• Highland - https://consult.highland.gov.uk/ 
• Nottinghamshire - https://consult.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/
• Reading - https://consult.reading.gov.uk/
• Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea - https://consult.rbkc.gov.uk/
• Wakefield - https://consult.wakefield.gov.uk/
• Torridge - https://consult.torridge.gov.uk/
• Uttlesford - https://consult.uttlesford.gov.uk/

There's no https://consult.greenwich.gov.uk/ though!

Technical details

To make the Twitter account announce consultations I've used a free online app called IFTTT (IF This Then That) which lets you set up a trigger, in this case an update to the RSS feed from the Open Consultations page. I've linked the Twitter account (@ConsultationsUK) so that when a new feed item appears (the trigger) the resulting action is that that account emits a tweet with the title of the new consultation and its link.

I won't know if it's worked until a new consultation is added!

RSS to Twitter - turning website updates into automated tweets, with IFTTT

Some Twitter accounts are broadcast-only (they send tweets but there isn't a person behind the account typing out these tweets) and they're useful for getting news feeds from various websites and sources.

There are several ways of creating one of these "bots" (Twitter robots, automated accounts) - you don't need to know how to program and you don't need your own server.

Probably the easiest way to set up such a Twitter account is to use the free IFTTT service (which stands for 'IF This, Then That'). If a website has an RSS feed (look for an orange square icon with a radiating white pattern) then you can use that to set up a system that will ping out a tweet for you.

You will need

• an input, in this case an RSS feed
• an output - a spare Twitter account

To make your own Twitter feed based on an RSS feed you can use an IFTTT recipe that converts RSS feed items into tweets, it's called RSS to Twitter.

The steps are

1. Create your spare Twitter account and log in
2. Create an IFTTT account and log in there too
3. While logged into both IFTTT and Twitter go to https://ifttt.com/twitter and activate Twitter as a channel (this will be your output) you probably won't need to activate RSS as a separate channel but just in case its https://ifttt.com/feed

Here's an example from one that I've made, the @moviesinconcert feed for the Movies in Concert website - my IFTTT 'recipe' is a modified version of the RSS to Twitter recipe, it's at https://ifttt.com/recipes/262124-film-music-concert-info-from-movies-in-concert-rss-to-twitter

#filmmusic: (Brooklyn, New York / USA) 07.10.2015 - Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular http://t.co/DV0E1kByrn The Doctor Who Symphonic Spec…

— Movies in Concert (@moviesinconcert) May 2, 2015

Here’s what it looks like under the bonnet with the RSS feed as the ‘trigger’ causing the action of sending out a tweet. I’ve added the hashtag #filmmusic and asked the recipe to publish this along with the title of the update from Movies in Concert along with the address (Entry URL) and the first line of the page.

If you click into the lower box it looks like this and you can click on the blue ‘science flask’ icon to change the options, this will change what the tweets look like.