Consulting on cuts: Roger Morgan and Mike Lindsey from Office of the Children's Rights Director

I was at an event with local authority participation workers recently where many workers expressed frustration that they had been told not to consult with young people on public spending cuts because of the risk of a conflict of interest. Yet, as Dr Roger Morgan and Dr Mike Lindsey from the Office of the Children's Right Director emphasised at the CROA Conference, "It's important that children and young people do get consulted about priorities and cuts, as well as their being consulted on what happens in good times, their being consulted on what happens in bad times too is absolutely vital".

You can hear directly from Roger and Mike in the video report by Joe Roberson below. As they explain: "We're doing more consultation than we've ever done before to feed into government decision making" and "consulting children is not just a good thing to do in relation to Article 12, participation etc. It's also a pretty smart thing to do in terms of efficiency."

How can public employees support young people to express their views on current policy and spending changes? Are we doing enough? Or is there more that could be done?