| Neighbourhood Governance Meeting Notes 16/01/07
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Notes from the Neighbourhood Governance Specialist Scrutiny Panel held at the Town Hall Tuesday 16th January 2007
I was the only member of the public attending, but probably because of my positioning on the militant wing of WEN, I was, unlike David at the last meeting, not asked to join the participants around the rectangular table.
Publicising Area Committee (AC) meetings as a way of Increasing Resident/Resident Group Attendance
The point was made more than once that if residents are not interested in the contents of AC meetings they won't attend anyway. Councillors believed that putting AC information in ‘Around Ealing' or producing an AC calendar supplement to it might help. Lots of talk about creating, maintaining and using email lists; letters to residents groups; neighbourhood notice boards; even foreign language communications eg in Punjabi. An inspired suggestion was to contact/invite all Streetwatchers in the area.
Councillor Popham made the salient point that the publicity angle should be addressed after this panel and ultimately the Cabinet had decided whether to modify, maintain or replace the current AC structure.
Another blinding flash of common sense was that all the residents who attended ACs should be asked to sign up with their name, affiliation, address, email etc; and then subsequently ‘automatically' invited to subsequent meetings. The point was made that certain more elderly residents didn't have email and would need to be phoned or written to. At this point the meeting Chairman (Councillor Brookes) admitted that she didn't know the difference between hardware and software. (I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at that point).
Residents Panel for Ealing
As well as postal surveys and focus groups, a residents' panel is being created. 1,100 residents have already been recruited and the target is 100/Ward . Some Councillors were amazed that they knew nothing of this project. Other comments included: if these people have volunteered, they will not be a representative panel; why not random selection; what about ages/sexes of the panel?
One third of the panel will be refreshed annually. 12-14 year olds are not in the panel. Councillor Elliott was keen to get sixth formers into the panel.
Reports on Area Committees
Councillors had clearly been travelling to other boroughs in the UK to see how others used ACs and how other non-AC mechanisms were employed to perform the governance functions and engage the local population in these processes.
Councillor Popham noted that there seemed to be a direct correlation between successful ACs and those with a high level of support. Current ACs would function better with more support. Quantifying the cost of this support is possible but would be somewhat arbitrary
Questions posed included; why can't more budget and more decision making powers be delegated to ACs; all ACs are not ‘equal'in terms of senior officer support (Councillor Elliott griped about Northolt - at least they have an AC, which is more than West Ealing has, the author mused at that point).
The point was made that visiting these other boroughs showed that there are many different approaches and that none of them are perfect. Some ACs meet in the afternoon; some are based on neighbourhoods and take no cognizance of Ward boundaries. A related point is that some residents don't know which Ward they live in; don't really understand how the Council works; and have no knowledge of ACs - their existence, function or content.
Discussion with the Transport Team
Noel Rutherford, Planning Director and Geoff Warren, Head of Transport Planning were in attendance. Mr Rutherford baldly stated that Ealing had seven ACs each with their own communities and cultures. He said there was little connectivity between the seven ACs and this lead to inefficient use of scarce transport officer manpower; projects were drawn out and often not completed within a financial year and consequently TfL money when not spent was lost. AC projects were often small and a small project would need a 2,000 word report as would a large project. He felt that ACs were good at consultation but poor at delivery. He had supported many ACs and often the actions and follow-ups took much longer than attending the meeting itself.
The Chairman famously at this point said ‘Yes - democracy is a messy business.'
She then launched into a terrific tour de force on the ‘top down' nature of Transport and how it represented a democratic deficit. Transport does the wrong things; gets its priorities wrong; and doesn't carry out early stage consultations with residents and resident groups. Transport has spent millions on speed bumps, which no residents or resident groups requested. Why can't we have Ward projects which are initiated by Councillors or residents? She violently objected to being rushed into spending money because it was there to be spent.
Noel Rutherford replied by saying that he was going to give us an officer view of how Transport tries to deal with ACs. Money will be wasted unless we have quicker wins and less weird AC projects. Transport projects often cover multiple areas and involve time consuming liaison between different ACs with different views. He felt we had too many ACs and we should merge them and have less of them. The Chairman leapt in at that point and said that all he'd said was completely at odds with ‘bottom up' democracy.
Geoff Warren took over from Noel and stated that there were enumerable legal and policy constraints about what Transport can and can't do. Mayor Livingston provides most of our money and in many ways determines how it will be spent. Other constraints concerned network management which was borough-wide; pedestrian and cyclist considerations; Secretary of State directives; and TfL directives. There were issues of consistency and safety to consider; best value performance indicators to meet in both central and local government domains. He's been at Ealing for 5 years and had supported many ACs; many uncompleted traffic schemes (where the money had ‘timed out'); and seen a lot of inefficient use of money and resources. He also asked all attendees to appreciate that he had only four transport planning officers of which only one had considerable, relevant experience. He said he'd found it exceptionally difficult to design transport solutions in a large committtee - what was required was a small group of experts.
Then we had a torrent on two traffic war stories - Acton Town Station traffic lights from the Chairman; and Petts Hill Bridge from Councillor Elliott. Both suffered from the same complaint of no early consultation. This point was rammed home a number of times that early consultation was deemed a necessity.
Coucillor Popham felt we were all too hung up on budgets and not hung up enough on engaging with residents and finding out what they wanted. He further opined that the smaller the area the more effective the AC, and we probably should be dealing with neighbourhoods. In his Ward of Cleveland for example there were Copley, Pitshanger and Gurnell neighbourhoods which were all quite different from each other. In fact some areas/neighbourhoods had no dedicated AC eg West Ealing (hurray I silently cheered)
The Chairman said she saw little respect by Transport for local knowledge eg Waitrose traffic lights. Mr Rutherford pointed out that Transport's activities over recent years had reduced death and injury on our roads. She then pointed out that in some other boroughs all the Transport budget was delegated to ACs.
Councillor Popham summed this phase of play up rather nicely by saying that there was a process mismatch between ACs and other functional parts of the Council of which Transport was but probably the best example. He then went on to beg the question - just what topics and issues should be pursued at ACs and how should ACs operate? ACs in total can spend £300,000 of the transport budget. In other boroughs it's much higher. We used to have 5 AC meeting/year now it's 4. Should we have more AC meetings at the beginning of the year in order to set priorities and early start transport projects for example so that they have a chance of being completed? Another Councillor wanted 8 ACs /year. He wanted the flexibility to aggregate budgets across Wards and maybe across years so that larger meaningful projects which residents desperately wanted could be executed.
Workshops, Reports and Timings
An interim report from this panel is due on 21st March, 2007. Workshops are set for the afternoons of 14th February and 26th February. Final report could be ready by May, 2007 but it could be later. Next panel meeting is on 15th March.
Eric Leach,
WEN Interim Committee member
17th January, 2007 |
| Last Updated ( Monday, 22 January 2007 ) |
