It's the same old story as our new ideas are ignored again

A few years ago, I wrote a series of articles for this newspaper saying how pointless it was to write to any government department, especially with a new idea.

At the time, I blamed Gordon Brown's administration. I thought things would be different under the new one. With some fanfare, it actually invited the public to submit ideas to its Programme For Government website. Oliver Letwin, the Government's policymaking chief, was especially excited by this initiative. "At last", he said. "Government has realised that there are 60 million citizens who really do have ideas. Through processes like this, we can give real power to the people."

About 9,500 citizens took him at his word and sent a suggestion to the website. If you were one of them, you might just as well have put your idea into a bottle and wafted it into the waves at Whitby.

With no fanfare at all, the Government has just published the response to the exercise. No department showed any willingness to take a new idea on board. Instead, departments took the chance to regurgitate existing policy, and some cheekily treated the public submissions as an endorsement. Top marks for chutzpah to the Department of Energy and Climate Change: "A theme which emerged was that you want this coalition to display a real sense of urgency in addressing two challenges: securing energy supplies and decarbonising the economy.

We agree."

The Government has two other ongoing appeals for ideas from the public. George Osborne wants proposals for cuts in public spending (how about cutting consultations the government intends to ignore?) and Nick Clegg, wants ideas for laws and regulations to abolish. An embarrassing number of people suggested the laws on cannabis, and this exercise, too, is likely to go up in smoke.

Of course, you are free to ignore these set-piece consultations and submit your bright idea directly to the Minister concerned. This exercise is equally futile. Your letter or email will be passed down a chain of officials in the Minister's office.

Thirty years ago, when I was a civil servant, such letters were eventually answered by an official with operational responsibility for the matter they raised. Not any more. Your letter or email will now be answered by some kind of "Public Response Unit" – the official equivalent of customer services in any large business and equally negligible.

The official who signs the reply will have no direct interest in the subject and no motive whatever to read your suggestion in any depth or indeed at all. The reply will be processed and irrelevant , with the characteristic phrase "it may be helpful if I explain the Government's position". No it isn't helpful at all, if you want to change the Government's position.

One must be fair to the Government. Some respondents to any consultation, or freelance letter writers or emailers, are abusive or simply dotty. Some are humorists, like the chap who suggested a windfall tax on people named Steve. Many people simply want to sound off about some general issue, such as immigration, which has dominated responses to the present consultations. All these people, except the abusive, deserve a proper reply. But among the crowd are people with a worthwhile idea for their Government, and they need something more, namely recognition and advocacy.

That is why the Government made a fatal mistake in simply parking the public's new ideas on departments, where they are certain to face intense institutional resistance.

Like any large organisation, departments dislike good new ideas from outsiders. They disturb the normal flow of business, and they show up the well-paid responsible managers: "Why didn't you think of that?" The problem is aggravated in Government, because every department and agency has a strong corpus of wisdom to protect, and more important, powerful "stakeholders" to appease.

Most civil servants do not spend very long in any particular job: their prime concern is to get through all their paperwork and avoid a career-wrecking disaster. They receive little or no reward from promoting innovation, especially one which disturbs good relations with powerful interest groups.

Is there any hope for your brilliant idea in government? Yes, but on no account write directly to a Minister and do not reply to any Minister who requests new ideas from the public.

Instead, you should form yourself into some kind of consultancy. Give this consultancy a claim to special knowledge of some new science, real or invented, with a high-sounding name, such as "ubiquitous discovery management". Do not express your new idea in plain English, but wrap it up in the technobabble of your new science. You might then persuade a department not just to adopt your idea but to pay you a lot of money for it.