A9 consultation gets 41,000 responses. 38,000 are the same sentence

The Highland Superhighway consultation closed with 41,000 responses, the largest number ever received by a Scottish trunk road proposal.

Of those, 38,140 consist of an identical sentence generated by a campaign tool. Officials are required to read, log and categorise each one individually, a task estimated at 340 staff hours.

Why the template hurts the campaign

Consultation responses are weighted by argument, not volume. Thirty-eight thousand copies of one sentence are recorded as thirty-eight thousand responses and assessed as one point, which is what the guidance has always said and what campaign organisers are frequently surprised to learn.

Two of the three organising groups have acknowledged this and said they will not use a template again.

“A hundred letters that each say a different true thing about a different bend in that road would have been harder to answer than thirty-eight thousand of these. That is not me being difficult, it is how the assessment works.”

An official working on the analysis

The three thousand

The remaining 2,860 substantive responses include detailed submissions from hauliers, six community councils, two mountain rescue teams, a peatland restoration partnership and the operators of the Highland Main Line.

The response the analysis team have circulated internally, and which officials confirmed is being treated as a substantive submission, came from a nine-year-old in Newtonmore.

It runs to a page and a half. It asks where the river is going to go, whether the fish know, how long the fish have been there, and whether anybody has asked the people who live at the bit where the fourteen lanes turn back into two.

Asked whether the child’s letter raised anything not covered by the professional submissions, an official said it raised the same three things as the hauliers, the community councils and the rail operator, and did it in a page and a half.