We’ve said it before, but online consultation and engagement isn’t just taking offline work and replicating it online. Asking for someone to write you a letter, or print out and post back a pdf document doesn’t mean you’re doing online consultation.

So this site is odd. It’s taken the notion of a letter or large free text response and put it online, but just in the shape of a simple comment form. No prompting for topics to cover, little in the way of background info and not really an engaging web tool.

The unstructured form of the responses will make the review’s analysis work harder and thus more costly than it need have been as well. Scaleability can be a real problem with sites like this, and if this site does receive large numbers of responses, then real problems could emerge that could have been designed out at the start.

It’s a real shame this, as the flooding this summer concerned huge numbers of people, all of whom will doubtless have an awful lot to share with the review. So taking such a simple and unengaging approach to such a massive opportunity for large scale public engagement is an opportunity lost.

Our Ideas Tree for the Department of Health is still storming on in terms of submissions from people across the UK, both in its online form and its offline form being used at large numbers of public events. We’d be interested to know how the response rate from this site compares.