Improved community facilities for young people are more important than New Local Government Offices

My local District Council sought my views about their proposed new District Council offices.

Their question was whether I found X, Y or Z design of building more visually appealing for their new expensive Council offices.

There has been an enormous local campaign against these offices but, with the backing of the ruling majority local Councillors, the local District Council has pressed on regardless.

I suspect my response to them about their proposed new District Council offices may well already have found its way to their waste paper bin.

To avoid my time in writing my submission to them being completely wasted, I include it below. Perhaps it will strike a chord with others who feel Local Government is unresponsive to local peoples true wishes.

I have excluded the name of the District Council and the consultation reference number because I suspect that the way they behave is not restricted to my local area but is a problem relating to Local Government accountability in the UK generally.

Dear Sir

I have completed the online consultation relating to Consultation Reference Number : (deleted)
To ensure that my views have not been lost in your computer system, I include them in this email below:

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on this matter which is of fundamental importance to our area.

It is with great sadness that I feel bound to make the following observations.

Regarding your plans to build new Council offices

I do not support Concept Z or Y or X.

I do not support your desire for new offices.

I consider your arguments for new offices are weak.

I do not believe that the general local public will benefit in any way whatsoever from your vast expenditure on these offices.

I believe you have bulldozed through proposals for extremely expensive Council offices against the wishes of the local community.

I strongly believe that the priorities of the Council are very, very, wrong because you the Council are putting your own comfort ahead of the dreadful need for regeneration that has existed, unresolved, in the local District for many years.

I believe that there are numerous local projects that could have better benefited from the money you are planning to spend on your own comfort.

Regarding your methods of consultation

I strongly disagree with the way you have set out this consultation form. I believe that by limiting selection options to approval options, you are skewing the response to the survey. To me, your consultation methods are seeking to obtain a specific response from the public that will make it appear that the public agree with your plans. I do not believe the public agree with your plans for new offices.

In this case, by participating in this survey, I fear that you will claim that I have supported your proposal for new Council offices because there is no option for me to select to say I don’t agree with spending all this money on new Council offices.

I believe that previous public surveys you have issued have been similarly technically flawed and I recollect that this has been well documented in the local press.

Regarding the level of local public dissatisfaction with your proposals for new offices

I do not believe that the local public could have made their objections about your new offices project more clear. The ordinary people of this area do not want your new offices. Do you not remember how the whole of the local high street was filled with ordinary people who were objecting to your proposals and the petition? Do you remember all the emails and letters? Do you remember all the angry people at the public meetings? Do you remember all their impassioned speeches?

Regarding the cost to local people of your campaign for new offices

No doubt the bill for your new offices will be paid by the ordinary local taxpayers, directly or indirectly.

Unfortunately, there is a greater cost to the people of this area and it is the ongoing cost incurred by the businesses and local people because of this substantial error in your priorities. I believe you should be spending our money on more important matters.

Before spending money on expensive new offices for yourselves, you should have spent money on the following.

1) Creating proper leisure environments for the young people of local towns and villages is more important than your new offices.

2) An indoor leisure amenity for visitors to this area when the weather is bad is more important than your new offices.

3) Community projects that bring local people together such as art galleries, museums and sports centres are more important than your new offices.

4) Improving your consultation methods so they are publicly auditable and appear to genuinely take all views into account is more important than spending money on new offices

Just about anything I can think of is more important than your expensive new offices.

Regarding this consultation

I commend that you have asked me for my opinion on this matter. This is a step forward and I wish to give credit where credit is due.

However, I regret very much that there is no audit trail to enable me to objectively prove that my comments have been taken into account. I will not trust your consultation systems until the communication is two way with forensic arguments debated backwards and forwards in public until proved. I consider the fact that you have not instituted such systems to prove conclusively that you do not want genuine informed public dialogue or debate.

The Internet was created to enable debate between thinkers (originally University academics). It offers the ideal way of improving democracy to achieve improved decisions. Local Community forums could be instituted that would easily provide this facility. The Local Authority are sadly missing this opportunity for creating an environment for better informed and auditable debate. In consequence, my conclusion is that the you do not genuinely want such dialogue and debate.

Regarding the publicly stated wishes of the local community

I am deeply saddened that after so many years of trying to contribute positively to issues of how to improve the local area, I find it necessary to write such a negative message to my Local Authority.

Enormous amounts of time have been wasted by ordinary people who care about the local area and who have expressed their disagreement with your campaign for new offices. You are well aware of the manner in which they registered their objections but I will list a few:

1) Objectors to your expensive new offices have filled the local high street in public demonstration and delivered public petitions.

2) Objectors to your expensive new offices have written you letters and emails to which you have not replied. (Evidence for this is based on your not replying to my letters and emails and discussions with others who said you did not reply to their letters and emails).

3) The overwhelming majority of those who found the courage to speak publicly at the public meetings about this project were against your new expensive offices.

4) Significantly, those in the general public who have contributed so much time objecting to your proposals have done so at their own cost and inconvenience. Against them has been arrayed the might of the your salaried corporate resources.

5) At very least, it could have been made an election issue with the local people being allowed to vote through public polls. Requests at public meeting for this were refused. Why?

In conclusion

I do not believe that you can be in any doubt that, at very least, substantial numbers of the general public do not wish you to spend huge amount of local ratepayer’s money on new offices for yourselves.

I do not support your plans for expensive new offices.

You should defer any further expenditure on your new offices until after the elections in 2007 and only proceed if you get full endorsement of your plans from the local community which I don’t believe you would get.

In my Local Government area, the same political party has been in power for many, many years and is voted into office come what may because of local demographics.

Power is therefore retained by a small local political group who appear completely uncommunicative to those outside their clique.

I believe that Councillors should be required to publicly debate local public policy and be publicly and forensically accountable for their decisions.

I believe that, if they do not have the capacity to engage in forensic debate, they should not be Councillors and the process of public forensic debate is the best way to expose such inability to all people in the local community.

Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly should be aware of these sorts of local problems relating to her White Paper “Effective, accountable and responsive Local Government”.

In the UK, we badly need this new fundamental democratic safeguard. Perhaps, then, the decisions our democratically elected representatives take might start making more sense.