The city council voted last Thursday to have have the civic affairs committee do a review of committee meetings, with a view to making them more effective and better value for money.
The motion was put by John Hipkin, who has been an outspoken critic of area committees, since they cost a lot of money and tend not to have much effect.
I voted for the motion, and I want to say more about why I did. I like area committee meetings but I think a better alternative is possible, and will be found by the civic affairs committee.
The big problem is the variety of people who turn up to these. I seldom see young people, newcomers to Cambridge, representatives of diverse community groups. The hours of the meetings are very difficult for parents of young children, or in fact, the children themselves.
The groups you do see at area committee meetings are residents associations. These people do a superb job, they give up an enormous amount of their time to provide a civic benefit, and unlike councillors they don't get an allowance for it. However, residents associations are already the best at communicating with councillors and have their own regular meetings. Some of them only invite councillors from one party, which is a shame, but it's their right. I think more meetings organised by local community groups would be a great thing. Look how strong the hustings in the general election were. We heard from a resident at the west central committee meeting before last that a resident wanted to organise hustings for local elections - brilliant!
There is far too much theatre in council committee meetings and I think bottom-up organisation has the power to chuck a lot of that out. A councillor recently told me that the only reason they do so much of it is because they want Jon Vale to take notice and report on it. There must be more efficient ways to do that, it seems a bit broken.
The list of oral questions last night was 21 questions long, we didn't get through half of them. My question about inequality didn't have a chance of being answered - there were so many councillors asking questions they already knew the answer to.
A similar thing happens at Area Committees - residents ask questions that they have asked several times before. However, they're not asking because they want to be there asking it, they're battling to get the system to do something when they have failed to do so repeatedly in the past.
It's a real shame that this is what they they have to do, the hoops they have to go through, to try and achieve change. It's not a good use of time.
I will mention the Lib Dem amendment to the motion, while I'm writing, the amendment didn't add anything substantial to the actions of the motion, it sought to acknowledge the strong record of the council in doing things democratically. That just seems like an attempt to glorify the good old days of the Lib Dem administration. I think amendments like that are yet more bluster and theatre, and I don't want to encourage it. And also, I lived in Cambridge for 7 years before I had any contact with councillors, committee meetings, or politicians, and that finally happened when 38 Degrees started to become active in Cambridge and persuaded me to come to a lobbying event to try and persuade Julian Huppert to vote against the Gagging Bill. Where, incidentally, he completely shrugged off everything that he was told by the panel and a large audience.
Another reason why I'd like to see the civic affairs committee take another look at committees is that the landscape has undeniably changed since the last review was done - Twitter and other social networks mean that multiple conversations are going on at the same time. Not just councillors nattering to each other while someone else is talking, but people in their homes providing comment on the topics under discussion. The diversity of opinions on Twitter is extremely wide and provides interesting, useful perspectives. There many people who would never pay attention to committee meetings if they weren't covered live by citizen journalists, generous with their time.
There must be a way of including this activity, and this modern reality, better in the structure of discussions. Modern conferences like the BETT technology in education conference allow people to put questions to the chair using Twitter, and a selection of tweets is shown on a big screen at the front of the hall. It doesn't prevent people from having their say, and more than any other meeting where insufficient time is provided for public questions.
And its not that Twitter users should be given priority, it's that they should be given better access. I would support giving priority however, to those voices we never hear, because the system discriminates against them. I would consider having a chair with instructions to actively seek a balance of genders, ethnic groups, and ages. The chair should avoid gendering speakers based on appearance, and ask their pronouns. Non-political advocates should be available, to speak on behalf of people who are immobile, or suffering from social anxiety or other conditions that make public speaking or appearance impossible to consider in other circumstances.
And finally, with all the will in the world, it will be difficult to engage people in local democracy when we continue to use the blunt instruments of electoral history. Cambridge was one of very few cities which voted in favour of proportional representation, that was something the Lib Dems did well to move up the agenda. It was a campaign of fear, uncertainty and doubt which undermined the PR referendum in 2011, but the 2015 elections showed the enormous flaws in our system once again. So let's try and get this broken system fixed, starting by reinventing our local elections. We should be lobbying government to allow us to use proportional representation for these, and I intend to put a motion suggesting this at the next full council meeting. I am in favour of Single Transferable Vote, but the mechanism isn't important, the principle is important.
I believe that is how to reawaken interest in what we do, and get voters turning up to local elections AND to local committee meetings.
