I went to a meeting in Witney today organised by the District Council. There's something called the West Oxfordshire Strategic Partnership (WOSP), "made up of representatives of West Oxfordshire District Council and major agencies and sectors in the community". After much consultation, WOSP has produced a document called
Shaping Futures: A Sustainable Community Strategy for West Oxfordshire. The meeting was to introduce this document to interested parties. It's still a document in the making, in the throes of the consultation process.
The word of the day is 'partnership'. There may be a new word tomorrow, but today we're partners. I think we used to be stakeholders, but obviously there was something wrong with that word. However, being a 'partner' makes me feel I work for John Lewis... It also suggests we are all equal, and I certainly don't find that is true.
For partnership to work, you need partners. Willing partners. This is the problem. Several impressive people described partnership in action, mostly in the context of the
Rush Project which miraculously costs no extra money and teaches teenage girls to play football instead of throwing stones at cars. The presentation to the meeting was very impressive so I was surprised to find afterwards almost no mention of the project on the web, beyond the link above, and it appears never to have been mentioned in the local press. But it is a useful model, even if the outcome to date is extremely modest. For the
Wychwood Project Nick Mottram also gave an impressive presentation. He has partners too.
However not everyone wants to work in partnership or sees the point. We have an uphill battle in Charlbury convincing small businesses and the self-employed that we/they should contribute to discussions and policy formation of this kind. A number of town/parish council were represented at the meeting, though not Charlbury: that's not to say that Charlbury didn't make a comprehensive submission along the way. But it seemed a pity that none of the town councillors was there: at the very least it was a good opportunity to network and see what other people are getting up to. (Eight people booked to attend but didn't turn up to collect their badges: four were from parish councils.)
The consultation process involved
1300 individuals and organisations including public bodies, voluntary and interest groups and all parish and town councils. I jotted that list down in the order it was read out, and two things struck me.
The first is that if you are important enough you can be consulted as an individual. In this process, you can just represent yourself. You and I live here and pay our taxes but I doubt if
you have achieved that status for consultation purposes. Correct me if I'm wrong.
The second and more basic point is that consultation only works if those consulted are themselves representative and consulting. You see, the consultation is mostly done with intermediate bodies. True, they got MORI to give them feedback from a 'citizens panel' of 1000 West Oxonians, but most of us were completely unaware of this and won't
feel consulted. They won't achieve public 'ownership' of the process this way. When your town or parish council was consulted, did it in turn consult you? Have you had a questionnaire? Have there been public meetings? That is the acid test. What input have you been offered?
The only example of how this works that I know about has to do with buses (again!). Look at this. Suppose that when the bus services in your village come up for tender, the county council finds that the service is proving very costly. Yes, some villagers rely on the bus to get to the doctor or the shop, but how many? Would it matter if the bus was withdrawn? Would a taxibus do instead? Or no bus at all? Is it a question of routes or timings -- are the buses going to the right places at the right times?
Consultation to the rescue! The County Council writes to the local parish council and asks its opinion. Many (but not all) parish councils have PTRs (Public Transport Reps) who are supposed to keep their ear to the ground on transport issues, so they are also approached direct. OK, so the letter goes out. Here's the big question: given a threat to their local bus service, what proportion of parish councils will respond to the letter?
The answer is half. Put it the other way round: half of all parish councils do not express an opinion when told their local bus service may be reduced or withdrawn. What else do they not express an opinion on?
Such is the nature of local participation. You may think that when you elect your local council, it is representing your interests. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. How can you tell? A lot of parish councils have no website. Some put their agendas and minutes on the web, others refuse. WODC offers free websites to all parish councils and voluntary bodies in the area: few take up the offer. The meetings of all councils have to be open to the public (though scarcely anyone ever attends to observe), and minutes can be consulted somewhere: perhaps at the clerk's home or in a public library. So it's all public information: it's just a question of whether the council makes it easier or harder for you to find out. Finstock displays the documents on notice boards so everyone can see them.
A surprising number of councils do not publish an email address even for the clerk. When it was suggested that councillors' contact details should appear alongside their names on a local website (the council itself does not have a website), at least one councillor expressed the view that he did not stand for election on the basis that people would be phoning or emailing him about council business. It's not that uncommon for councillors not to make their contact details public in this way, though of course they may be in the phone book. But when I told this story to one of the WODC officers, he shut his eyes and punched his head in frustration.
Charlbury Town Council publishes neither phone numbers, postal addresses nor email addresses of councillors on the town website: just contact details for the clerk. The parish council page on the Finstock village website (which is not accessible from the site's home page as far as I can tell) was last updated in June 2005, and gives no contact details for councillors. (And by the way, the pages for the WI and the parish church are 6 months old, and the opening hours for the village shop are out of date.)
So I wasn't sure about the 'strategic partnership' approach recommended by the meeting. If you raise your voice you will be heard. But does it matter that so many people are not 'represented' by an interest group, or 'consulted' by a parish council?
Well, actually yes. Because this is all part of the legitimisation process for a whole new planning framework which is to replace the old Local Plans we have all grown to love or hate. The 'partners' whose voices will undoubtedly be heard -- the developers, the landowners, the commercial and professional interest groups, the road lobby -- are busy preparing their submissions. The new LDF (Local Development Framework) that is to be in place in a couple of years is supposed to reflect what communities want: big stress is a laid on the wishes of the local community.
This may explain why Cornbury weedkilled and ploughed a field that had become something of a village amenity in Finstock, a couple of weeks after the fact of its amenity value was discussed at a public meeting where Lord Rotherwick was present. Ploughing it and planting a crop on it doesn't mean that Cornbury wants to return the field to agriculture: under the LDF they are in the process of seeking to have it zoned for housing. But meanwhile the recreational and amenity value to villagers must be extinguished to make the switch to housing seem more reasonable. The plough put paid to the local bee orchid colony too. Too late now to campaign to save it.
If your local landowner, an aggregate extraction company and a hypermarket are the only people among those consulted to respond, then it's their interests that will be heard loud and clear. Of course it isn't quite as bad as that, and it's clear above all that the WODC 0fficers are working hard to create a quality plan for the area out of the various inputs they receive. But as an example of democracy in action, the very local infrastructure is plainly not up to it. Thank God for the council staff who will protect us from the worst of its shortcomings. But just how effective can they be in the light of such massive failures of the democratic process?
