I sent off a raft of emails this morning and have had a couple of replies. An email sent from the department of Customer Rights, Scrutiny and Monitoring on behalf of the Chief Executive's office said that further information would be availible tomorrow. I also had an email from Jane Storey the Deputy Leader of the Council. I will paraphrase here. Essentially there hasn't been much consultation yet because the Council meeting ont the 23rd was purely to reach agreement on the principle. The engagement strategy is being drawn up and more details will be available soon.

It is remarkable how better disposed one feels towards people when they actually reply! There is a lesson here about having a system so that somebody sending an email knows that it has reached its intended destination- even if this is an electronically activated out of office message.

But I digress...

The upside of  this waiting game is that it has given me the opportunity to repeat my question many times  to numerous different people and in doing so refine it and become clearer about what it is that I am trying to find out. Given that the NSD is going to be a long process with a number of different phases it feels important for to me to focus on specific issues with clearly defined aims and objectives. I  am a lot less vague than I was a ten days ago.

To recap, agenda item 7 concerning the New strategic Direction contained the following clause:
   That there should be proactive and wide ranging engagement across Suffolk to establish that the NSD proposals find favour with the communitites we all represent before moving forward to implementation, and the findings from this engagement be reported back to Full Council at the meeting on 2nd December 2010 [stress added].

Given that the engagement strategy is still being drawn up there isn't a great deal of time to fulfill the commitment made in this clause.

What I want to know about the (hopefully soon to materialize) engagement strategy is this:

1. What methods are going to be used to 'engage'?
2. What is the underlying rationale for these methods being chosen?
3. With whom will this engagement take place?
4. How will the outcomes from these methods be recorded and analysed?
5. Who will be carrying out this analysis?
6. Who will be writing up and preparing the report?
7. What analytic criteria will be used to decide whether or not favour has indeed been found?

So, I will just have to wait a bit longer I guess.