Comment

Representation ID: 19726

Received: 02/03/2009

Respondent: Messrs. Chishick, Commotto and Terry

The document appears to have most of the ingredients, but the recipe is very confused. We are concerned that the document is over- structured, making it unnecessarily long and complicated. This will make it inaccessible to the majority of members of the public who are unable or unwilling to devote a considerable amount of time to the document. The division into scope, issues, aims and objectives often seems strained, and has encouraged padding. There is too much overlap between the Strategy Directions and Preferred Strategies (they should be merged).

The over-elaborate structure also breaks up and disperses the content across the many sections and sub-sections, resulting in some duplication and incoherence (and requiring the repetition of some of our comments). The division into Scope, Issues, Aims and Objectives often seemed unnecessary. In reading through the document, we found ourselves highlighting what we believed to be gaps in strategy in certain chapters, only to find that the issues had been addressed later in the document. It was confusing and difficult to get a rounded view of many strategies.
We are also concerned that the important safeguards on the implementation of certain strategies were rather diminished by being separated into overview, geographic and thematic chapters. If this document is to be developed, it needs consolidation and rationalisation of the document into a simpler, more intuitive structure, and greater use of cross-referencing, particularly between the geographic and thematic chapters.