Minutes:
Question
Regarding agenda item 28 - Climate Emergency Community Deliberative Processes; Why has this document been put to Executive for approval when the Overview and Scrutiny Management Committee raised a number of concerns about it that demonstrate it lacks any credibility?
Answer
This was an opportunity for your Councillors to make their recommendations to me as theExecutive Member for Resident Services, Communications and Emissions to consider before this report goes to Executive for approval this evening. The only resolution that was recorded in the meeting minutes was that the review of the potential Climate Emergency Community Deliberative Processes should be noted. Which I have done.
There were a number of questions asked during the discussion at Overview and Scrutiny which were addressed directly by the Officers at the meeting. In coming up with recommendations for deliberative processes, fifteen diverse and wide-ranging community deliberative processes were analysed. This report incorporated information from industry experts such as Involve, as well as benchmarking against several other local authorities’ experiences where they were available. The comments made by members at the Overview and Scrutiny Management Committee have also been noted.
The paper setting out which deliberative processes, and the particular topics and the costs, will come to the Executive in October. Local deliberative processes on a range of topics and consulting a wide cross-section of our population is an essential element in finding the solutions to our climate emergency and I hope everyone will support them.
Supplementary Question
Why has this report got more raw opinion gathering tools than meaningful deliberative processes assessed in it and made recommendations on a flawed scoring methodology?
Supplementary Answer
The processes that were looked at are the ones that are published on a website of an organisation called Involve. They are experts in running local deliberative processes around the world. They have done it in this country, they have done it in other countries, they have done it for councils, and they have done it for entire nations. It is the list of processes that they have put forward as best in practice on their website and those are the ones that we have gone away and analysed and benchmarked.
I will accept that the scoring system that has been used is a subjective one. It is subjective to us as a community. It is subjective to us as our climate emergency to the conditions that our Borough exists in. In comparison to some other communities, it may seem like it is strange or different compared to Reading or to Oxford or to Leeds but we are not a primary metropolitan area we are a combination of a rural borough and some large towns. We have a very unique climate emergency. We have a very unique make-up and we have scored it on what we believe is right for our community, right for our climate emergency and will give us the most diverse collection of opinions back from our residents.
We cannot force our residents to do anything, that is not within our power. We have to work hand in hand with our residents. This is a vital part of that process. This is a vital part of coming to the solutions that we need to put in place in order to get to carbon neutral by 2030. I am hugely supportive of it and I hope that going forward we will have a multitude of deliberative processes on a variety of different topics and some of them are going to be open to a large number of residents and some of them will be very focussed and conducted in a certain place at a certain time with a specific cross-section of our community.
But I can assure you that the work that has gone in behind this whilst it may seem subjective, and it is. It is subjective to us as a Council, us as a community and us as our climate emergency.