Response to concerns over Haringey's online consultation portal

Following this discussion about the Online Consultation portal, I sent an email to Lorna Reith,

"I am writing to you to express my concern about the effectiveness of the the online consultation portal that the Council have set up. I have tried to use it on two occasions and have found the site very difficult to negotiate.
I have registered to use it now and have left a comment on the Wood Green SPD but am surprised to discover, through correspondence with the department responsible for this consultation, that comments made are not published until one month after the consultation closes even though the document implies by the way it is set up that you will be able to see what people have written.

I fully understand the reasoning that the council came to the decision not to
have comments visible before the end of the consultation, as they want comments on the document not discussion, but I would suggest that it is counter productive that when you click on the "Who said what?" button that you are told there are no comments on the document. This implies that nobody is bothering to comment and psychologically, I feel that people will not attempt to add comments on a website that appears to have no traffic. A simple remedy for this would be for the welcome page to register the number of comments, if not the actual content, although a simple process of delaying publication of responses for 24 hours would enable officials to weed out the irrelevant and still allow informed comment to be read by interested parties. A comment counter would make people feel like the document was part of an active consultation process.

I am therefore requesting a number of things:
1. Please could you review the current layout of the website and introduce a
user friendly welcome page that would explain about how commenting works, why people need to register quite so many of their personal details (another thing which may put people off) and what to expect once their comment has been registered.

2. To do away with comment buttons and "Who said what" links and introduce a simple counter system which tells people how many comments have been left.The interface is unnecessarily busy and over complex as it stands.

3. Many national government pages have discussion forums on their documents for consultation. It would be useful for Haringey to introduce something like this to allow for general comments. This of course could be moderated to safeguard against abuse.

4. In the correspondence, I learned that NO comments on the Housing SPD were made online which surprises me given the strength of feeling on the housing issue in the borough. Therefore, I would like to know how much the Limehouse portal cost to set up and maintain. Given that there has been apparently little traffic on it so far I am wondering whether it represents either effective community consultation or value for money."

The amazingly efficient and well organized (no sarcasm intended, she really is the only one who has responded regularly and in full to my enquiries), Ms Reith secured the attached reply to my concerns from Sule Nisancioglu, Head of Planning Policy and Design.
(it is 3 pages long and so better as an attachment, I think)