Collaboration and consultation

Five submissions (YWI, Doras, TUI, GHN, staff member 5) made broad, Department-level recommendations related to DCEDIY collaboration with other Departments, agencies, and NGOs. Doras suggested that collaborative working should be “enshrined throughout the SoS”, and staff member 5 recommended including “collaboration as one of our values”, along with an “examples of cross-Departmental collaborations that we are involved in” (for example, AIM and the CAS project). Staff member 5 also recommended including a commitment to establishing a collaboration unit that would facilitate information sharing and collaborative working between policy Units, Divisions, other Departments. Challenging the Department’s current collaborative processes, the TUI stated that recent experiences of consultation with the Department “have been unsatisfactory at best” and requested that the current process of engagement on the Statement of Strategy be “meaningful”. With respect to governmental advisory groups and committees, the GHN suggested that the Department consider “positive discrimination….for minority interest groups” in order to ensure that there is “political will to eradicate barriers to equal treatment and opportunities”.