Transforming public consultation analysis

Public consultations are the cornerstone of democratic policymaking. When government departments propose changes to housing policy, education reform, or healthcare delivery, they turn to the public for input. These consultations generate thousands of responses that must be carefully analysed before ministers and local authorities can make informed decisions.

But there's a problem. The traditional approach to consultation analysis is slow, expensive, and often produces inconsistent results across large teams.

A new approach

The answer was Cobflow, a state-of-the-art planning and analysis software that streamlines the entire consultation analysis process onto one secure, collaborative platform.

Alma Economics, a leading provider of consultation analysis for several government departments and public sector organisations, saw this challenge from the inside. Having analysed dozens of consultations in the past four years alone, we understood exactly what was broken—and what needed to change.

As one of Alma's senior researchers put it: "We built the tool we wished existed when we were doing this work manually. Every feature solves a problem we've lived."

Users can upload datasets in various formats from different sources, explore and clean data—automatically removing hate speech and personal information—with just a few clicks, assign themes to open-text questions either manually or using AI, conduct analysis with advanced filtering and segmentation, and generate customisable reports in days rather than months.

The challenge

A major UK government department recently faced a consultation challenge that illustrates the scale of the problem: 28,000 respondents answering 21 multiple-choice questions and 13 open-text questions, generating 588,000 quantitative responses and 364,000 open-text responses requiring manual coding and analysis.

Using traditional methods, this consultation would have required seven staff members working for four months, at a cost of £203,000 just for labelling open-text responses. Add the risks of delays, the complexity of hiring and managing temporary staff, and maintaining consistency across thousands of manual coding decisions, and the true cost becomes even higher.

The result? Time lost, fewer voices heard, vital input missed, and policymakers left with less data to inform critical decisions.

Real-world results

For that same major government department consultation with 28,000 respondents, Cobflow transformed the process entirely.

Instead of seven staff members working for four months, the project required just four team members for one month. The cost dropped from £203,000 to £17,000—a 92% reduction. The timeline shortened from four months to one month—a 75% time saving.

The result wasn't just faster and cheaper—it was better. The department could process more responses, identify patterns more accurately, and deliver insights that fed directly into impact assessments and economic models that inform ministerial decisions.

The human element

What sets Cobflow apart isn't just the technology—it's the philosophy behind it.

While the platform harnesses AI to automate time-consuming tasks like theme assignment and data cleaning, human analysts remain firmly in control and accountable. They train the AI, review its suggestions, and validate its outputs. This isn't just a "human-in-the-loop" approach. It's “human-in-control”, where every decision and outcome is owned by the analyst, not the algorithm.

This matters particularly in public consultation, where the stakes are high. When analysis informs policies on housing, healthcare, or education—decisions that affect millions of lives—transparency and accountability aren't optional.

Cobflow provides auditable data, clear training documentation, and traceable reasoning.

Beyond efficiency

The benefits of Cobflow extend well beyond time and cost savings.

By lowering the barrier to conducting thorough analysis, the platform enables the government to support and encourage broader public participation. When analysis is faster and more affordable, departments can handle larger consultation exercises, reaching more citizens and gathering richer data.

This, in turn, creates better evidence for decision-making. More structured datasets make it easier to assess policy impacts and weigh costs against benefits, giving policymakers the evidence base they need for sound decisions. It also enables more inclusive policy development. The platform improves coding consistency as well, applying standard taxonomies that reduce variability across large teams and multiple projects—a persistent challenge in manual analysis.

What's next

Public consultations are evolving. Citizens expect faster response times. Policymakers face mounting pressure to demonstrate that public input genuinely shapes decisions. And with consultations growing larger and more complex, the old manual approaches simply can't keep pace.

Cobflow represents a new generation of public sector technology: tools built by people who understand the work from the inside out, designed to serve policy rather than complicate it, and sophisticated enough to handle complexity while remaining intuitive enough for analysts to adopt easily.

Trusted by major government departments and public sector organisations across the UK, Cobflow is already changing how public consultation happens—making it faster, more affordable, more transparent, and more democratic.