Commenting on yesterday's post Pat Nurse suggests that responding to government consultations is futile.
A response from Forest … is likely to be ignored because it doesn't agree with the Govt agenda and we do know that modern consultation is a scam. Gotta go through the motions though, I suppose.
I share Pat's cynicism, up to a point, which is one reason I hate writing responses to consultations, but I disagree that it's a complete waste of time.
This past month is a good example.
At the beginning of August Forest responded to a consultation on the Health (Tobacco, Nicotine etc. and Care) (Scotland) Bill.
In our submission we were fiercely critical of plans to make it an offence to smoke in hospital grounds; we also argued against the use of excessive regulations to restrict the sale and promotion of e-cigarettes.
As a result of that I was invited to attend a meeting to discuss the Bill with the Scottish Parliament's Health and Sport Committee.
At that hearing on Tuesday one MSP made an impassioned plea for the Scottish Government to allow smoking zones within hospital grounds. Others made it clear they weren't convinced a complete ban was right or enforceable.
Given the opportunity to engage with a parliamentary committee I repeated Forest's opposition to a ban on smoking in hospital grounds and my comment that it was "inhumane, petty and vindictive" made headlines in several newspapers in Scotland. It also lead the local evening news on BBC1.
Today, as I mentioned earlier, Scotland on Sunday has reported the result of a survey – not any old survey but a Scottish Parliament survey – that found that almost two-thirds of Scots oppose "nanny state" plans to impose a smoking ban in hospital grounds.
Would all that have happened without Forest's intervention? I don't know.
But consider this. On Tuesday I was the only one of the four witnesses who spoke out against a ban on smoking in hospital grounds.
Linda Bauld (Cancer Research UK) supported a ban but said defining non-smoking areas was "complex".
Sheila Duffy (ASH Scotland) supported a ban, said it was good for people's health, and quoted the result of a 2014 YouGov poll that suggested a large majority were in favour of the measure.
Andy Morrison (New Nicotine Alliance) declined to comment.
Had Forest not submitted a response to the consultation and had I not been at the meeting on Tuesday those headlines would have been very different.
It's too early to say whether we've influenced the final regulations – I suspect the Scottish Government will still want to make it an offence to smoke in hospital grounds – but we've helped keep the issue alive and we have, perhaps, helped change public opinion.
Let's not forget too that Forest's submission to the 2012 Government consultation on plain packaging included over 250,000 petition signatures against the policy.
In total there were approximately 700,000 petition responses to that consultation, over 450,000 against plain packaging.
Was it a coincidence that it took the Department of Health eleven months to publish a report on the 2012 plain packaging consultation (the normal time is three months) or that the Coalition Government chose (at that time) to kick the issue into touch?
I'd be very surprised if our petition, submission and campaign wasn't a factor.
So for all those reasons I would argue that one should never dismiss responding to a public consultation as "going through the motions".
Yes, it can be tiresome, frustrating and dispiriting and may often end in defeat.
Sometimes though it's worth the effort. This week was one of those moments.