Right to sweat the small stuff?

That the issue up for consultation is so uncontentious that it wasn’t worth responding to in the first place.

And / or that the feeling was that the outcome was already known, and so the consultation was irrelevant, indeed, an irrelevance.

Both of these might apply in the recent consultation exercise for an increase in bus fares for 2025.

An increase of 10p for a single fare, from £1.50 to £1.60, would be widely expected. Everything goes up by 10p nowadays. The only other remedy is to shrink the product, which is not always possible.

So no surprise why nobody would get excited about such a consultation this time around.

It would be of more concern if people did not engage because they believed the outcome was preordained – or though, in this case, it was very unlikely that the 10p increase would be turned around, even in the instance of a mass uprising among passengers.

Maybe this exercise proves two things. That 10p is the new ‘de minimis’ for price increases, and that deputies, who, given the opportunity, would have likely been keen to argue, at length, for every possible price point in scope, should not sweat this kind of small stuff when there are far bigger issues at play.