Most consultation teams worry about the wrong thing.
The instinct is to worry about reach: did enough people respond, did we hit the right groups, did we run it long enough? Those matter. But when a consultation ends up before a judge, the argument is rarely "not enough people were asked." It's "you didn't actually take the responses into account before you decided." And that's a much harder thing to defend, because it lives inside your own records rather than in your headcount.
The legal test hasn't changed in forty years. A lawful consultation must clear the four Gunning Principles. Three of them concern how you run the consultation: consult when proposals are still in a formative stage, provide enough information for people to respond intelligently, and allow adequate time. You can plan all three. You can put them in a project timeline.
The fourth is different. It says the decision-maker must conscientiously consider the responses before reaching a decision. You can't schedule that. You can only evidence it after the fact, and only if you kept the right record while it was happening.
Here's the practical problem. A significant consultation generates hundreds or thousands of responses, arriving through a web portal, by email, in the post, through stakeholder meetings, and increasingly through channels nobody set up on purpose. A small team triages them, themes them, drafts a response document, and moves on to the decision.
Six months later, a Freedom of Information (FOI) request or a pre-action letter lands, asking a simple question: show us that you read response number 412 and took its point into account.
If the answer lives in a spreadsheet somebody has since edited, an inbox that's been archived, and the memory of a colleague who's left, you don't have an answer. You have a reconstruction. And a reconstruction is exactly what the "conscientious consideration" challenge is designed to expose.
This is not a hypothetical risk. Judicial review of public law decisions has risen steadily, and consultation is one of the more common grounds. The point is that the record is the defence. When there's no contemporaneous, unedited trail showing that each response was seen, themed, and fed into the decision, the process becomes a matter of assertion, and assertion is weak ground before a court.
A defensible consultation record isn't a filing cabinet, digital or otherwise. It's the ability to answer three questions quickly and without editing anything:
What did every respondent say?
Who saw it, when, and how was it categorised?
How did those themes show up in the final decision?
Storage isn't the hard part. Most teams can store responses. The hard part is preserving the link between a specific response and the decision it influenced, in a form you didn't reconstruct after the challenge arrived. That's a difference in kind, not in tidiness. It's the difference between "we have the responses" and "we can prove we considered them."
Plenty of consultation teams run on spreadsheets and shared inboxes, and for a small consultation, that can be enough. The problem is that both are silent about their own history. A spreadsheet doesn't tell you who changed a theme label or when. An inbox doesn't tell you whether a response was read before or after the decision was signed off. Neither was built to produce an audit trail, because neither was built with judicial review in mind.
That's the real question worth taking to DigiGov this year, and it's bigger than any one product: as consultations get larger and legal scrutiny gets sharper, is the tooling most teams rely on capable of proving the one thing the fourth Gunning Principle demands? Not storing the responses. Proving they were considered.
If your honest answer is "probably not, if someone really pushed," that's worth knowing now, while it's a procurement decision, rather than later, when it's a pre-action letter.
Jambo is a Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) platform used by UK public sector organizations, including the Low Carbon Contracts Company and the University of Cambridge, to manage communications with key contacts and maintain a defensible record of every response. Jambo is available through the G-Cloud 15 framework, holds ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 27017:2015 certifications, and meets UK data residency requirements. Come and talk to us at DigiGov Expo 2026.